Measuring and managing end users' performance has become increasingly important to ensure customer satisfaction. While services and infrastructure might be healthy and available within the data centre's firewalls, consumers may still have problems accessing services externally via the Internet. This then becomes a guessing game to isolate the problem to the customer's Internet Service Provider, or to the provider's faulty service. Further, in the age of Twitter and Facebook, providers are increasingly at risk with distributed denial-of-service-type attacks. A lot of providers today, such as Amazon, Google, and Salesforce.com, provide publicly available information about the current and historical status of their services.
Increasingly, service-level agreements are tied to the end user's experience of interacting with a service. If the end users cannot access a service, then a simple "tweet" on Twitter can lead to a rapid chain reaction of user complaints...