Application Performance Monitoring

If you're having trouble maintaining a high uptime for your business critical applications, then may be it's time to start using application performance monitoring tools to figure out the problems. We tell you about several interesting ones in this story

Friday, June 29, 2007

Print

Comment

Email

Digg

Del.icio.us

Reddit

Twitter

For any organization it is important to know the methods which will improve the overall performance of their critical applications. For this, a deep understanding of various factors influencing the performance is critical. If an organization only relies on superficial capabilities for performance management, then it will never be able to go to the core of the issue. Most organizations including govt. agencies for their regular day to day work involve networked applications. If any business critical application gets interrupted, it will directly have an impact on the revenues or productivity of that organization.

An application performance monitoring tool is basically a piece of software that monitors, diagnoses and informs about the problems that slow down the applications you are running. Application performance relates to the speed as in how fast transactions are completed or the information is getting delivered to the end user by the application via a particular network, application and Web services infrastructure.

For collecting client side application performance information there are basically 3 types of products available. One of the products is management software along with distributed agents which are deployed on client machines to capture performance data. Another one is the monitoring software which collects performance metrics across an infrastructure. Last but not the least there are applications which monitor traffic and capture metrics, such as response time, while users interact with the applications.

Even Windows has its own monitoring tool, popularly known as 'Perfmon'. It is largely used for system monitoring, but can also be used for monitoring applications. To use Perfmon from the Windows menu, choose run and type perfmon. This will open a Windows performance monitor application. Here select System Monitor and click on Add button on the tool bar. This will open Add Counter dialog box, here choose whether you want to monitor an application on the local computer or on a remote machine. To choose an application you need to click on the drop down menu of performance objects. This will show all installed applications on the machine, let's create a sample monitor for an ASP.NET application. You can see all available counters for ASP.NET applications in the select counters list. Choose the counters of application which you want to monitor and click on Add. You can also see details of a counter by clicking on the Explain button. That's it and you are now monitoring performance of your ASP.NET applications. You can also see counter logs and alerts under performance log and Alerts option. Now, this is the basic approach to applications performance monitoring. In this article, we have covered some of the important application management tools and how they help you to determine the main reason for the dip in performance of a particular application.

NetIQ AppManager suite
Enterprises demand productivity and visibility of their system management solution and at the same time it should be capable of adopting and exploiting next generation technologies. NetIQ AppManager caters to this particular need of the enterprise. It provides the critical foundation needed for safely adopting and exploiting new-age applications, such as, VMware ESX server, Microsoft SharePoint and Exchange Server 2007, BlackBerry Enterprise Server, Oracle Grid Computing and Cisco or Nortel IP Telephony (VoIP) solutions.

NetIQ AppManager is designed to manage a variety of components from physical hardware to server applications to end user response. It also helps IT organizations to reconcile systems and application events with the impact to end user services, and hence making prioritization of work easier and better. It provides a deep management view of any cross platform infrastructure and has about 65 applications and services available across Windows, Linux, VoIP and network devices. Via the AppManager Control centre, you can get a visual representation of IT resources mapped to business applications and services. Hence you can easily figure out the ownership and headcount for all elements, the services depend on, as well as understand how element failures impact services. Standard scripting languages such as XML, VBA and Perl etc is used by AppManager.

Prerequisites
Prerequisites for AppManager Suite are .NET Framework 1.1 SP1 for Windows 2003 along with Visual Basic 6 SP6. Other key prerequisites include, BITS Client, Microsoft Mdac, Microsoft .NET Framework, XML Parser. You need to make sure that you have IIS service manager running on your system along with BITS.

Define various deployment rules for packages like IIS, Exchange 2007, SQL Server etc. You can also view their status, along with rule summary

How to implement the AppManager
Once you have installed the AppManager, you can go to the Control Center and start managing a group of computers. Start with logging into the Control Center repository database. The Control Centre is where you do most of the work to manage the systems on your network. In the navigation pane, you can view the deployment packages, rules, and deployment tasks. To manage servers and workstations from Control Centre console, your first need is to identify the computers and applications using discovery option. Now you can create a management group by right clicking the AppManager icon. You can add the members which are eventually the computers you want to include under the management group.

Under the Deployment tab, you can view what all packages, rules and deployment tasks are available. Select the packages you want to deploy, from Packages option. It will show you the names of various packages, such as AppManager for Active Directory, AppManager for Microsoft Internet Information Services. Under the Rule tab you can set rule for various packages and check there status whether they are enabled or disabled, installed or not, and what are these packages meant to do. Suppose you want to setup rules for IIS then, you will need to give a rule name and a brief description. After that you need to select the packages, for which you want to set the rules. You can also do pre-deployment check, which will check for all the prerequisites. If a certain package requires further configuration, it will be prompted on the screen and you will need to install the other required components. Then, you will need to specify the account information and authentication credentials to allow files to be installed. After configuring the credentials, you will need to choose target computers to install the files. You can choose from options like agents, domain, specific computers, computer list file, and management groups. Once you have made the choice, you can further add filters, like inclusion filter and exclusion filters. Then you need to specify the deployment Service along with deployment Schedule. You also have the option to get notification on successful deployment via e-mail for which you need configured SMTP server. Finally, you will get a summarized report consisting of all the parameters that you have set for the package. Deployment Task tab shows all the deployment tasks that have been generated by the deployment Service. Another tab is Software Inventory, which shows the AppManager agents and modules that have been installed on each computer. It provides you with vital details, like computer name, application name, version and which platform it is running.

After the deployment task is done, you can also see how many repositories are configured and can manage each one of them. All you need to do here is to click on the Repository option and either modify the previous one or add a new one. Security can only be managed by the administrator, where in he can grant full permission or restrict permission to selected groups. Now coming to the management part of it, management group gives you the option to either create a new management group or an event or a job or a knowledge script or a server view or a service map. To create a new management group select the option for creating the new management group, give it a name and add the member, whom you want to manage; it can be an IIS, or an SQL server or a VoIP. Then define a policy for it and finally define the security parameters. Once you have done all, you are ready to manage that group. You will be able to see the details of all the events and jobs and also how many members are there in all. For jobs details, you can go to the newly created jobs and see what the status of these particular jobs is; you can also stop a currently running application or start it all over again. It will also provide information, like the knowledge script or user of that particular job, enterprise job ID, last run time and stop time. You will be able to check the severity status along with the maintenance status-what all jobs are running on it and to which repository they belong to etc. In the pane below, you can check the events details, jobs details and other details, such as CPU utilization, memory utilization, network, etc.

LivePerf
LivePerf can monitor distributed applications across various Operating Systems. It supports both agent based and agent-less monitoring. It can be used for monitoring Windows applications, MS SQL server, Oracle MySQL, Websphere, Weblogic, Apache, JBoss, etc. In agent-less monitoring, it lets you create process-based providers that can run command line tools with the use of rexec utility or telnet or ssh2. These providers are designed for collecting chunks of data and to send them to the LivePerf's main console. It also sends visual alerts, e-mails in case of a warning or failure and can be configured to run a script or execute an application automatically incase of a failure.

Using LivePerf for monitoring MS SQL Server
Running LivePerf is simple. Just unzip the LivePerf package and open the command prompt. Go to the location where you have unzipped the LivePerf files. Now, run the console.bat file, this will open the GUI console of LivePref. Now to monitor applications for their performance, you need to create a Monitoring Session. To do this from the menu bar, click on the New Session button. This will open a |new window asking you to add hosts you want to monitor. Here, either provide the IP addresses of the hosts or the host names. Now your monitoring session is ready.

LivePerf lets you choose which events of MS SQL you want to monitor, before you activate its agents

Next thing you need to do is to add agents-right click on the monitoring session and choose Add Agents. This will open all activate agents on the Host window. Here you will find all types of performance monitors supported by the LivePref. From the Databases option choose MS SQL Server, now it will ask you to provide MS SQL 'sa' password and what components you want to monitor. Choose the components you want to monitor
and click on activate agents. Now click on Run Session option. At this point agents will start gathering data and send it to main console at specified intervals. LivePref also lets you save a session and reload it later on.

Page(s)   1