Types of Monitoring for applications :

Applications are simultaneously monitored at various points to
ensure its availability and monitoring as a whole falls under
following categories :

1. Health Monitoring : As a proactive step application
health has to be monitored constantly in order to address any issue
before it becomes a serious issue . Health monitoring in a simple
arrangement will consists of taking a snapshot of system &
application parameters and comparing it to the standard benchmarks . For
example in a system if a transaction is known to take around one second to
complete and we can monitor this response time and setup alerts if the
response time increases . Automated monitoring of health parameters is the
best way of ensuring high availability of an application environment.

2. Error Monitoring : Errors in any application can impact the user
experience adversely. An error condition in an application can cause user
experience to fail out rightly or can cause unexpected errors such as time
outs or failure to submit or display the requested data . Errors can
arise either due to software problem , relating to application
code , web server , application server or database server or due
to an hardware issues relating to memory , CPU processing , disk space or
network issues .

These type of errors are monitored differently , application errors are
mostly monitored by analyzing the application , web server , application
server logs , understanding the error message and using that error
message to find the nature of problem . For example an application
may stop processing new requests and from log files we may find the
possible reason for this behavior if the application is not able to
process the requests due to resource shortage like cpu , memory ,network
bandwidth , database performance etc. Application monitoring requirement
and tools to monitor can be designed by studying the application
documentation , architecture , platform , error messages etc.

Hardware monitoring is done using the standard tools and commands available
for the particular hardware. Every operating system has tools and commands to
monitor memory usage , CPU usage and disk usage but to monitor & report
these resources on a regular basis custom scripts can be written which
is independent of application code .

3. Performance Monitoring : Performance of an application is
critical to create good user experience. An application which responds
to user requests in reasonable amount of time will have a good impact on
user whereas an application which takes seconds or minutes to respond
will cause users to abandon the application . Application Performance is
derived from application code and supporting hardware . The code ensures that
the program routines incorporated in the program are capable of handling at
least desired number of actual user requests and hardware provides the
necessary memory and processing capabilities..

Application performance can be monitored from the application access
time , request processing time & time reported for various transactions in
the application logs . While the application logs may provide some data about
the processing time actual user experience can be simulated by sending
requests to applications from different locations and measuring the resulting
application response time in real-time.

4.Configuration Monitoring : Applications releases and
operating system changes can impact the hardware and software configuration of
a machine .It is very important to monitor configuration to avoid any
undocumented and untested configuration element .Each of the configuration
change needs to be documented and monitored for any unauthorized change
. The best way to monitor configuration is through a change control process
where a change is submitted approved and them implemented . The change control
process keeps record for all the changes and allows to monitor
the changes by the persons responsible for the applications.

5. Security Monitoring : In today’s global scenario it is very
important to monitor applications for security . Security monitoring
involves ensuring latest security patches are implemented in application
servers , web servers & database servers . Software
companies frequently issues security warning in their software
products and these security warnings should be carefully studied
& implemented to ensure compliance and protection against hackers . At any given point of time the software versions should be monitored to understand if they poses any security threat and update them with newer & secure safe version .

Some companies have security teams who constantly monitor hardware and
software for possible security breach and send their recommendations but
generally support team should subscribe to the newsletters from software
companies which informs about the later security threats .

NextPage – Best Practices for application monitoring

Tags: Application Monitoring

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 20th, 2009 at 10:20 pm and is filed under Monitoring. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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