Most organizations use some kind of network monitoring software to monitor network assets. A standard network monitoring system will track devices for uptime, bandwidth usage and monitor system performance. While this type of monitoring solution is beneficial for when issues occur on the network, it doesn’t help when there is an issue with an application. Most large organizations have a wide variety of applications to support. Some of these applications include enterprise wide applications that every user has installed on their computer. When a critical application like this is not performing efficiently or cannot be accessed you can assure the helpdesk phones will be ringing. Having the right tools to monitor for application performance issues can be a life saver and prevent a flood of calls.
Why the need for Application Monitoring
Firstly, you need to be aware that application monitoring is not the same as monitoring the network. The simple way to explain the difference is that network monitoring tells you when users can’t access an application. Application monitoring alerts you when an application is not working properly, even if users are capable to access it. For example, say all of the sudden your users cannot access Sharepoint. Your network monitoring software shows no problems on the network so you start troubleshooting the Sharepoint server. After taking the time to sift through the event logs and other various log files, you finally come across a service that had stopped on the server. The Network monitoring system could not tell us that, it just eliminated any issues on the network.
An application monitoring program would have alerted an administrator that something had failed on the server. Being able to swiftly identify issues with organizations applications will make the life of a systems administrator much easier. It also ensures that the applications are performing as expected.
Good application monitoring will give you an immediate visual overview of your applications, trend reporting, performance analysis and identify growth areas. All of this information is important when it comes to planning, meeting SLA’s and finding problems before they bring about major outages.
How Application Monitoring Works
The easiest and most effect way to monitoring applications is by using a centralized monitoring server. Most enterprise monitoring systems will come with a centralized management console. This software is setup on a server that will collect data from the applications. This could be a Windows or a Linux server. The technique used to gather this data is done in one of two ways, either agent-push or a polling method.
The agent-push process is a locally installed agent on the server that sends its data to the centralized monitoring server. This method can often provide additional features but it does require more manual labor up front. These agents alone are an application and can fail or not work properly. This is why the polling method is the preferred choice.
The polling method uses Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) or simple network management protocol (SNMP) to poll data from the monitored apps. SNMP and WMI is simple to setup and you don’t have to worry about keeping it updated.
Options for Monitoring Application Performance
When it comes to finding an application monitoring performance solution, you will discover there is a broad amount of options to choose from. It really is dependent on your needs. You can decide between standalone applications for monitoring single systems or Enterprise monitoring systems that can monitor all the applications in your organization. There are also open source and commercial application monitoring solutions. Its best to try out a mixture of products to determine what best fits your needs.
Here are a few features to look for:
�Monitoring performance: Monitor for CPU usage, memory usage, response time, disk I/O
�Alerting options: Send notifications through email, SNS, syslog, dashboards and more
�Web Console: It’s nice to be able to access your monitoring system from any computer in the organization.
�Assign Rolls: Have the ability to give other users access to the monitoring system without being an admin.
�Reporting features: Having a powerful reporting solution helps to identify trends and potential issues.
