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The Importance of Monitoring Applications
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Application monitoring and management has
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IT infrastructure complexity has grown over the years. While networks have become faster and more capable, applications have become more sophisticated yet more complex to troubleshoot. A recent industry survey highlights the importance of application monitoring. This survey found that while 18.2% of all problems were network related, over 73% of the problems reported related to the server and the applications.
Client server applications of the past were relatively easy to troubleshoot. When a user reported a slow-down, it was the client, the network, or the application server. Today's IT infrastructure often includes multiple tiers of applications (e.g., web servers, databases, middleware applications, etc.) that work with one another to deliver services to the end-users. To effectively manage such infrastructures, it is important to monitor each and every application tier.
eG Enterprise - Providing Integrated Application Performance Monitoring
Since each application is distinct, administrators often use different application monitoring tools for administering and managing each application. The challenge with using different tools for monitoring different applications is that each tool has its own distinct interface and usage model. Hence, users have a longer learning curve. Furthermore, since different tools are used, a lot of manual coordination is involved in troubleshooting a problem that involves multiple applications.
eG Enterprise offers an integrated web-based interface from where administrators can monitor over 120+ common applications. Administrators can login to the eG Enterprise console and monitor the status of all the applications in their infrastructure. Role-based access and personalized views can be provided for users, so a database administrator can only view the status of the database applications, whereas a network administrator can only view the status of the network devices. By providing a single pane of glass for monitoring all the key applications in an IT infrastructure, eG's application monitoring software simplifies routine monitoring of the infrastructure, since users can now view and drill down into the status of different applications from the same web console.
Active and Passive Application Monitoring
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| Integrated monitoring of applications from a web console |
Applications can be monitored using active and passive monitoring approaches. Active monitoring involves emulating accesses to the application and measuring its performance, while passive monitoring involves observing the application behavior and analyzing its performance. Both of these approaches have advantages. eG Enterprise incorporates both active and passive monitoring of applications. By actively emulating client accesses to each application periodically, eG Enterprise provides an unbiased external perspective of the application's performance. While active monitoring is useful in detecting times when an application is not available or not responding properly, for early warning indicators of performance degradations, passive, internal monitoring is necessary. eG Enterprise performs internal monitoring by integrating with the interfaces (APIs) supported by each application. While SNMP was a standard for network monitoring, unfortunately, for application monitoring there is no such standard. Each application supports a different monitoring interface. As the figure below shows, eG Enterprise agents support a number of different interfaces to connect to different applications. The interface used to monitor an application is decided based on the depth of metrics exposed using the interface and the overheads incurred in obtaining the metrics.
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| eG Agents use different interfaces to monitor different enterprise applications |
eG Enterprise supports both agent-based and agentless monitoring for applications. While agentless monitoring does not require software agents to be installed on all the servers supporting the applications, it entails a higher network overhead (higher bandwidth consumption). Furthermore, since many legacy applications are restrictive in the metrics they support for agentless monitoring, the monitoring capabilities with an agent-based approach are often superior compared to an agentless approach.
Benefits of Application Monitoring with eG Enterprise
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Single pane of glass view into the IT infrastructure; administrators can see the real-time status of all the applications in their infrastructure from a web console. |
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Web browser interface and a common look and feel across applications monitored means that administrators do not have to learn to use different tools for monitoring different applications; |
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Agent-based and agentless monitoring of applications supported; |
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Supports active and passive monitoring of applications, thereby ensuring that administrators have both an unbiased external view and an in-depth proactive look at performance of an application. |
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Multi-tier IT infrastructures are a nightmare to troubleshoot because of the dependencies that exist between application tiers. For instance, a failure in the database tier could result in slow downs in the application and web server tiers. Hence, monitoring solutions that view the infrastructure as independent silos cannot effectively monitor and diagnose problems in such infrastructures. The addition of virtualization to such infrastructures makes monitoring and management of these infrastructures even more challenging!
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Fig 1: A problem in one application can affect all the other applications involved in the service delivery. |
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Fig 2: Excessive disk reads by the media server slow down Oracle database accesses |
Since a single VMware® ESX/ESXi Server is used to host multiple virtual machines (VMs), a single malfunctioning application on a VM can degrade the performance seen by applications hosted on the other VMs. Figures 1 and 2 illustrate such an example. In this scenario, users are experiencing slowness in their access to a web-based service. From the service topology, it is clear that the database server is the cause of the slowdown. Figure 2 illustrates that since the database server is hosted on the same ESX/ESXi server as a media server, high I/O activity due to increased access to the media server is resulting in the database server seeing slow disk accesses. To accurately diagnose the problem in this example, a monitoring solution must not only consider the inter-dependencies between applications that are involved in service delivery, but it must also consider the existential relationships between applications, virtual machines, and physical machines. Besides resource contention among guest virtual machines, applications executing on the ESX/ESXi service console can also affect the performance of the virtual infrastructure.
While knowing which VM is consuming excessive resources is helpful, it is even more important to understand whether the VM's behavior is normal. For instance, a memory leak in one of the applications executing inside a VM may be causing the VM's memory usage to increase over time. In such cases, it is essential that the monitoring solution be able to look in-depth into each guest VM and detect abnormalities. While deploying individual agents inside each VM provides this level of visibility, this can result in additional resource overhead, licensing fees, and maintenance cost.
Performance degradations in a virtual infrastructure may also be because a virtual machine has not been configured with sufficient resources to handle its workload. A monitoring solution must be able to differentiate problems resulting from inadequate virtual machine configuration and those resulting from hot-spots created by uneven distribution of load across ESX/ESXi servers. |
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