Implementation

To implement effective application monitoring one has to under stand
the nature of application , what exactly it is trying to do . For this one
doesn’t have to have the full application code knowledge but the basic flow
of information should be clear .

1. Uptime Monitoring
For setting this type of monitoring applications are monitored if they are
up and running . A simple monitor can be setup by monitoring the server urls
or server processes . The problem with this type is that it can tell if
a application is up it does not tell if application can process
the transactions .

2. Transaction Monitoring
Transaction based applications are best monitored using transaction monitor
. If the application involves some form submissions and displaying a success
message ,the same behavior can be simulated using some scripts and
status can be captured to find success status. The script can do the
transactions at repeated intervals and send alerts if something fails.

This can be used effectively in proactive monitoring if the application can
return back the transaction processing time or some other status which can be
quantified . The transaction completion time/status can be
monitored and compared with expected times . If a transaction takes much time
one can look at the application logs to figure out the problem &
take corrective action to avoid a crash.

3. Data files monitoring
In some application environments transactions happen offline
where the data travels in an offline manner from one point to another like
businesses sending their daily sales data to their head office every night in
the form of a data file. This type of flow can be monitored by constantly
monitoring the various drop and pick points of the data files . At
frequent intervals counts can be taken at drop and pickup points to ensure the
files are moving properly .

This also provides a means to proactively monitor the flow as the
problem will be known when files starts to accumulate at a drop point on
its first occurrence and system can be prevented from clogging by looking into
the cause which resulted in accumulation of files.

4. Database Monitoring
Applications uses databases and databases should be monitored for its
uptime state as transaction state . Uptime state is easy to monitor by
monitoring some key processes we can determine if data base is up or not. To
monitor the transactional health of a database some monitoring transactions
like creating records , updating the records etc can be done and the time
taken for each transaction and their final status is noted.

When the transactions starts to fail we can know that database is having
some issues but as proactive monitoring we can monitor the time taken to
complete each transaction . In most of the cases if system becomes overloaded
the transaction time will be higher and that can give a vital clue to look the
problem area in database and correct it before it goes down .

5. Resource Monitoring
CPU , Memory , network disk ,monitoring is equally important as the above
ones . constantly monitoring the system resources can prevent
application and operating system slow down and crash.

If the CPU and memory is reaching its peak the application can go into a
hung state . If disk space is full applications can crash right away as they
may not be able to write logs etc on the disk.

Network bandwidth over utilization can also causes application crash where
by the request queues starts building up due to slow network.

All the resources offer quantitative measurements and can be mentored
using the scripts using existing system utilities . For proactive monitoring
threshold values can be set for each resource and on reaching the
threshold one can investigate the cause of over utilization of resources.

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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.