Application Access - OS Test

Applications hosted on the system communicate within the system environment and may also interact with external entities such as public APIs, internet resources, or remote users. One of the key factors influencing the responsiveness of these applications is the latency experienced while handling internal and external communications. Prolonged response times often lead to delays, degraded user experience, system instability, and potential application timeouts. To ensure a seamless user experience, administrators need to quickly identify which applications are slow to respond, determine the source of the delay, and understand whether the latency is due to internal system communication or interaction with external resources.

This test helps achieve this by auto-discovering the applications running on the system and reporting metrics such as average and maximum latency, TCP connection counts, data sent/received, and total application traffic. For each application, the test also reveals the PID, connection type, and the direction of communication. This helps pinpoint applications with performance issues and assists in troubleshooting slow or unresponsive applications on the system.

Target of the test : A Proxmox Hypervisor

Agent deploying the test : An internal/remote agent

Outputs of the test : One set of results for each connection type:application on the target system.

Configurable parameters for the test
Parameter	Description
Test period	How often should the test be executed.
Host	The IP address of the host for which this test is to be configured.
Port	The port at which the specified host listens. By default, this will be NULL.
Monitor Latency For	Select the application processes to be monitored from the Monitor Latency For drop-down list. By default, All Processes will be selected, which means the test will report measurements for all application processes running on the system. If you want to monitor only whitelisted processes, choose the Whitelisted Processes option, this will configure the eG agent to monitor only those processes that have been predefined as whitelisted. By default, eG Enterprise offers a comma separated list of pre-defined applications specified against the WhiteListProcesses option in the [EXCLUDE_APPLICATIONS] section of the eg_tests.ini file available in the <eG_INSTALL_DIR>/manager/config folder. If administrators wish to add or remove one or more applications to/from this pre-defined list, then, they can do so by specifying the applications against the WhiteListProcesses option. To monitor specific processes, select the Selected Processes option from the drop-down, and then provide the list of process names in the Application Processes for Latency Monitoring parameter.
Application Processes For Latency Monitoring	By default, the value of this measure is set to none. However, if you configure the Monitor Latency For parameter to Selected Processes, you must provide a comma-separated list of the application processes you wish to monitor. The list can be specified in any of the following formats: processName1, processName2 processName1@remoteIPAddress,processName2@remoteIPAddress processName1@remoteIPAddress;port,processName2@remoteIPAddress;port
Proxmox Node Name	Specify the name of the Proxmox node that you wish to monitor in this text box. By default, this parameter is set to none indicating that the test monitor all the nodes in the target hypervisor.
Ignore VMs Inside View	Administrators of some high security Proxmox environments might not have permissions to internally monitor one/more VMs. The eG agent can be configured to not obtain the 'inside view' of such ‘inaccessible’ VMs using the Ignore VMs Inside View parameter. Against this parameter, you can provide a comma-separated list of VM names, or VM name patterns, for which the inside view need not be obtained. For instance, yourIgnore VMs Inside View specification can be: xp,lin,win,vista. Here, the * (asterisk) is used to denote leading and trailing spaces (as the case may be). By default, this parameter is set to none indicating that the eG agent obtains the inside view of all VMs on a Proxmox Hypervisor by default. Note: While performing VM discovery, the eG agent will not discover the operating system of the VMs configured in the Ignore VMs Inside View text box.
Exclude IP	Typically, when performing VM discovery, the eG agent automatically discovers the operating system on which every VM runs, and all the IP addresses that each VM supports. If two are more VMs on a target Proxmox hypervisor are in a VM cluster, then the eG agent will also auto-discover the cluster IP address. Since the cluster IP address is shared by all VMs in the cluster, this IP address will be in the discovery list of every VM in the hypervisor. In this case, if the eG agent attempts to obtain the 'inside view' of each VM in a cluster using their cluster IP address, incorrect metrics may be reported sometimes. To avoid this, you may want to instruct the eG agent to not use the cluster IP address when collecting 'inside view' metrics. For this, specify a comma-separated list of cluster IP addresses to be excluded in the Exclude IP text box.
Ignore WINNT	By default, the eG agent does not support the inside view for VMs executing on Windows NT operating systems. Accordingly, the Ignore WINNT flag is set to Yes by default.
Exclude VMs	Administrators of some virtualized environments may not want to monitor some of their less-critical VMs - for instance, VM templates - both from 'outside' and from 'inside'. The eG agent in this case can be configured to completely exclude such VMs from its monitoring purview. To achieve this, provide a comma-separated list of VMs to be excluded from monitoring in the Exclude VMs text box. Instead of VMs, VM name patterns can also be provided here in a comma-separated list. For example, your Exclude VMs specification can be: xp,lin,win,vista. Here, the * (asterisk) is used to denote leading and trailing spaces (as the case may be). By default, this parameter is set to none indicating that the eG agent obtains the inside and outside views of all VMs on a virtual host by default. By providing a comma-separated list of VMs/VM name patterns in the Exclude VMs text box, you can make sure the eG agent stops collecting 'inside' and 'outside' view metrics for a configured set of VMs.
Domain, Admin User, Admin Password, and Confirm Password	By default, this test connects to each virtual guest remotely and attempts to collect “inside view” metrics. In order to obtain a remote connection, the test must be configured with user privileges that allow remote communication with the virtual guests. The first step towards this is to specify the Domain within which the virtual guests reside. The Admin User and Admin Password will change according to the Domain specification. Discussed below are the different values that the Domain parameter can take, and how they impact the Admin User and Admin Password specifications: If the VMs belong to a single domain : If the guests belong to a specific domain, then specify the name of that domain against the Domain parameter. In this case, any administrative user in that domain will have remote access to all the virtual guests. Therefore, an administrator account in the given domain can be provided in the Admin User field and the corresponding password in the Admin Password field. Confirm the password by retyping it in the Confirm Password text box. If the guests do not belong to any domain (as in the case of Linux guests) : In this case, specify "none" in the Domain field, and specify a local administrator account name in the Admin User below. Prior to this, you need to ensure that the same local administrator account is available or is explicitly created on each of the virtual machines to be monitored. Then, proceed to provide the password of the Admin User against Admin Password, and confirm the password by retyping it in the Confirm Password text box. If key-based authentication is implemented between the eG agent and the SSH daemon of a Linux guest, then, in the Admin User text box, enter the name of the user whose <USER_HOME_DIR> (on that Linux guest) contains a .ssh directory with the public key file named authorized_keys. The Admin password in this case will be the passphrase of the public key; the default public key file that is bundled with the eG agent takes the password eginnovations. Specify this as the Admin Password if you are using the default private/public key pair that is bundled with the eG agent to implement key-based authentication. On the other hand, if you are generating a new public/private key pair for this purpose, then use the passphrase that you provide while generating the pair. For the detailed procedure on Implementing Key-based Authentication refer to Troubleshooting the Failure of the eG Remote Agent to Connect to or Report Measures for Linux Guests. If the guests belong to different domains - In this case, you might want to provide multiple domain names. If this is done, then, to access the guests in every configured domain, the test should be configured with the required user privileges; this implies that along with multiple Domain names, multiple Admin User names and Admin Passwords would also have to be provided. To help administrators provide these user details quickly and easily, the eG administrative interface embeds a special configuration page. To access this page, simply click on the icon adjacent to the Admin User text box. To know how to use the special page, refer to Application Access - OS Test. If the Inside View Using flag is set to ‘eG VM Agent (Windows)’ - In this case, the inside view can be obtained without domain administrator privileges. Therefore, set the Domain, Admin User, and Admin Password parameters to none.
Report By User	While monitoring a Proxmox Hypervisor, the Report By User flag is set to No by default, indicating that by default, the VM operating systems on the target hypervisor are identified using the hostname specified in the operating system. On the other hand, if you want the desktops to be identified using the login of the user who is accessing them, set this flag to Yes. In other words, in VDI environments, this test will, by default, report measures for every username_on_virtualmachinename.
Report Powered OS	This flag becomes relevant only if the Report By User flag is set to ‘Yes’. If this flag is set to Yes (which is the default setting), then this test will report measures for even those VMs that do not have any users logged in currently. Such guests will be identified by their virtualmachine name and not by the username_on_virtualmachinename. On the other hand, if the Report Powered OS flag is set to No, then this test will not report measures for those VMs to which no users are logged in currently.
DD Frequency	Refers to the frequency with which detailed diagnosis measures are to be generated for this test. For instance, if you set to 1:1, it means that detailed measures will be generated every time this test runs, and also every time the test detects a problem.
Detailed Diagnosis	To make diagnosis more efficient and accurate, the eG suite embeds an optional detailed diagnostic capability. With this capability, the eG agents can be configured to run detailed, more elaborate tests as and when specific problems are detected. To enable the detailed diagnosis capability of this test for a particular server, choose the On option. To disable the capability, click on the Off option. The option to selectively enable/disable the detailed diagnosis capability will be available only if the following conditions are fulfilled: The eG manager license should allow the detailed diagnosis capability Both the normal and abnormal frequencies configured for the detailed diagnosis measures should not be 0.

Measurements made by the test
Measurement	Description	Measurement Unit	Interpretation
Process instances	Indicates the number of process instances of this application currently running on the target host.	Number
TCP connections	Indicates the number of TCP connections established by the processes of this application.	Number	The detailed diagnosis of this measure reveals PID of each application process that established the TCP connection, local and remote IP addresses and ports used by each TCP connection, the rate at which the data was transmitted and received through each connection, the total amount of data transmitted and received through each connection per second, and the latency experienced by each connection in seconds.
Avg latency	Indicates the average latency experienced by the processes of this application while responding to user requests. The value reported is the average of latencies experienced by all processes of an application.	Seconds	A consistently high latency may be indicative of poor responsiveness of applications which adversely impacts user experience with the target multi-session host. Possible reasons for an increase in latency could be increased network delays, network congestion, server slow-down, too many simultaneous users on the server etc. Comparing the value of this measure across applications will enable administrators to quickly and accurately identify applications that are experiencing higher latency when delivering services to users.
Max latency	Indicates the maximum latency experienced by the processes of this application while responding to user requests. The value reported is the maximum latency experienced by one of the processes of this application.	Seconds
Data transmitted	Indicates the rate at which the data was transmitted by the processes of this application.	KB/sec
Data received	Indicates the rate at which the data was received by the processes of this application.	KB/sec
Total application traffic	Indicates the total volume of network traffic handled by this application process, calculated as the sum of data transmitted and data received.	KB/sec	A high value may indicate that the application process is actively handling a large number of requests or data-heavy operations. A sudden spike might suggest abnormal activity or heavy usage.