KUH - Keep us honest, a web analytic solution.

1. KUH – Keep Us Honest
KUH is HCL’s home grown tool that captures real-time data and provides
insight into end-user’s experience of a Web application. It provides capability of
measuring the aspects of website usage enabling IT to identify the root causes
of performance issues. The analytics collected through the tool helps IT make
educated decisions about actions required to resolve performance problems in
timely manner.
2013
Sachin Sharma | Atul Singla
HCL Technologies Ltd.
02/20/2013

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Table of Contents
Problem Statement.......................................................................................................................................3
The Solution..................................................................................................................................................4
Salient Features..................................................................................................................................5
Sample Report....................................................................................................................................6
Solutions Available in Market .......................................................................................................................7
KUH’s Differentiating Factors........................................................................................................................7
Results Achieved...........................................................................................................................................8

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Problem Statement
Pearson PCS (Publishing Control System) is an integrated suite of applications supporting program
planning, product development, business management features feeding to digital workflow and print
workflow used across Pearson Education North America business units. It is a Web based ERP solution
based on the standard ‘N’ tier application architecture with large user base spread across various
geographical locations.
Since PCS does online transaction processing, it is quite data intensive having numerous business rules
embedded in it. This at times makes the web pages heavier and causes them to takes more than
expected time to load. The performance issue could be at any layer in the architecture and it becomes
difficult, recurring and time consuming for IT to debug the cause due to lack of proper direction and
transaction logs.
Due to lack of detailed application health statistics, tracking the real cause of customer reported
performance issues continued to be a cause of concern to Pearson. Although customer complained
about the application slowness but failed to provide sufficient information for IT debug the cause. The
recurring performance concerns became a major issue and hence there was a need of a system that can
capture user experience and “Keep Us Honest” about the application health.
There was a need for a tool that can help us answer the following questions -
 Can we quantify our Website response time?
 Do we have dashboards to give IT the actionable insights they need to support our web
application?
 Can we identify the most frequently performed transaction?
 Can we identify key few issues that are impacting majority of application performance?
 Can we ensure that your customers across the globe share a consistent experience of our site?
 Do we have a response backed by statistics to the customer complaining about our site's
performance?

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The Solution
HCL’s web analytics tool KUH – Keep Us Honest emerged as the right solution to the problems stated
above. KUH captures real-time data that provides insight into end-user experience of PCS application. It
provides capability of measuring the aspects of website usage enabling IT to identify the root causes of
performance issues. The analytics collected through the tool helps IT make educated decisions about
actions required to resolve performance problems in a timely manner. Acting on the data captured by
KUH helps IT deliver consistent, reliable and optimum services that result in improved end-user
experience.
KUH is implemented using JavaScript based plug-in “KUH Tracking Code” that has to be added to a web
archive of application. As given in the architecture diagram below, this plug-in runs in the client browser,
collects visitor data and sends it to web server though an AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript) call to be
stored into a DB repository meant for analytics collection. If the browser caching is enabled, this
JavaScript snippet will be cached and there is no need to download this on every visit to the page.
KUH Architecture

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Salient Features
Performance Monitoring
 End to End customer transactions monitoring.
 Monitoring the performance of web
applications across the globe.
 Performance insight across multiple
platforms and browsers.
Custom Reporting
 In-depth custom reporting features like
Summary Report, Time Consuming
Transactions Reports, Trend Report, Heavy
Transaction Reports etc.
 Supports both push and pull reporting - The
reports can be scheduled to be delivered to a
predefined set of users at a predefined
frequency.
 Faster processing of data to enable real-time
reporting.
Ease of Use
 It’s a “Plug ‘n’ Play” tool that can be easily
enabled in a Web Application.
 KUH can be easily enabled / disabled for
specific user and for specific transactions
providing capability to decide for whose and
what transactions to be logged.
 Due to its Asynchronous / AJAX
implementation, the Transaction and
Response time logging doesn’t impacts end
user activities.
Robustness to Change
 Any new transaction implemented in the
application automatically gets logged through
this tool without additional modifications.
Secured
 The ownership of the data / transaction logs
remains with the performing organization
 Restrictions on data reporting can be enabled
to provide separated views of report for User
and Administrator respectively.

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Sample Report
Trend Charts

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Solutions Available in Market
When considering the different web analytics tools that your business requires, you may come across
plethora of available options which may be overwhelming for businesses that may not understand how
to use them. The below table lists down the features of few such solutions available -
Tool Features
Free, easy to deploy, easy to use, very flexible…to a point
Market leader as an enterprise tool. Incredibly flexible and powerful… but
with great power, comes great complexity (implementation and
maintenance). It’s not free and there is massive cost associated.
Built for eCommerce – from the tag structure all the way through the
reporting interface
“The Original”…but lost its way for a few years; good product, but playing
catch-up
KUH’s Differentiating Factors
“Investing in people and the tools that those people need to be successful is the key” notes Bryan
Eisenberg, author and marketing consultant. “But it’s the people who can understand that data that
really matter.”
Following are the differentiators -
 KUH provides data ownership and flexibility as the tool can be configured to log the data in the
Web Application’s transactional database or any other database local to the performing
organization. On the other hand with most commercial Web Analytics tool the performing
organization looses the Ownership and Control.
 Since the data log is maintained locally by the performing organization there is no issue related
to data security.
 KUH’s custom reporting features allow IT to produce / customize the reports as per business
needs. There is full control of data and hence it can be presented in any required format.
 There is an ease of customization and use. The tool is a simple plug and play utility that can be
enabled in any Web based application in no time.

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Results Achieved
Response Time Improvement
 Identification of consistent top 10 heavily used transactions
 Below are few examples of modules where significant improvement of response time has been
achieved.
Improvement in Overall Application Throughput
 Approximately 25% reduction in CPU Utilization. Currently the utilization ranges between 30-40
% on a typical business day.
 Helped identifying “Time of the day” when high CPU utilization was observed. Pattern revealed
that every two hours a batch job was getting executed during business hours.
 An application area “PDRM (Pearson Document Routing Module)”was identified where some
incorrectly written DB queries were resulting into high CPU utilization.

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Browser Issues Identification
 Helped identifying that PCS application web pages render faster on some new browsers as
compared to the older versions. Based on this information users were suggested to switch to
newer version or a different browser.
Network Issues Identification
 Identified certain geo locations where network was generally slow while connecting to
application server. Ticket was opened with the IT service helpdesk of the corresponding facility
in order to have the issue resolved.
Usage Pattern
 Identification of the differences in response time in alternate paths to accomplish a task. E.g.
locating a title through quick search takes longer time as compare to navigating to record from
the found set of titles in Advance Search.
Change in User’s Perception
 The performance issues in certain application areas were just user perception and this tool gave
enough data statistics to back the appropriate response to a complaining customer.
Reduced Guesswork
 The nature of the performance issues reported was either intermittent or continuous. The
continuous issues were easy to track and an obvious fix could be identified easily but to handle
intermittent issues KUH provided real-time snapshot of transactions, in absence of which
analysis was more of guesswork.

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Operating System (OS) Issues Identification
 The Response time of the application was observed to be higher for Windows XP users as
compared to user working on latest OS. IT team was able to suggest OS change / upgrade to
enhance user’s experience of application.