For almost two decades the focus of IT management has been on availability and network reliability. So much, in fact, that infrastructure reliability nowadays has an average of 99%. The new distributed IT management is instead placing its focus on application performance which is a far greater challange to monitor.

Application performance monitoring is central to ensure the productivity of business applications within a network. Without proper monitoring of applications you might miss what causes a sluggish mail-server or catch long loading times for the website because you are only monitoring the infrastructure devices.

op5 Monitor is a vendor independent and technology transparent monitoring solution that gives you a complete view of all layers of your network. op5 Monitor is an invaluable tool to stay in control of your applications performance and to help you plan for IT investments in the future.

Du you need to monitor your applications performance?

• Do you know what is considered to be “normal” performance for a group of users och an application, and how much this “normal” state changes when traffic peaks?
• Where in your system is the latency occurring?
• Did the infrastructure upgrade deliver the heightened performance that was expected?
• Do all of your server providers fulfill their SLAs?
• Do you know which applications in your network that is wasting the most resources?

Performance checks on four levels

To understand your network you need to understand how your applications perform both when at “normal” levels and when the high traffic demands kicks in.

The flow of checks can be divided into four levels:

• Check that the underlying hardware/infrastructure is in normal operational status.
• Check that the included processes in the applications are functioning normally.
• Run specific checks on the functional status of the different applications.
• Run generic process checks that will show you the overall performance of a complete service (function).

The “Business critical application” consist of the different objects that together forms the overall application. To achieve a successful application monitoring you need to check and measure the overall performance from all four levels to assure quality and up time.

In order to reduce downtime it is imperative to be able to have the full picture of your monitored network. This enables you to quickly identify the root cause of a problem a service or application is malfunctioning. With effective applications monitoring you can also be proactive with your efforts, making sure that no malfunctions even occur.

Monitoring performance from a End user perspective

An application monitoring tool must be able to assure that your end-users are experiencing good performance. Synthetically pinging your services is not enough to know how the system is running for a real live user. op5 Monitor is able to track the response time that real users experience when using your services and continuously provides you with the results. This keeps you informed about which parts of your network that is not performing to your standards and helps you decide where actions might need to be taken. You become proactive and can detect problems before end users are affected and/or start calling the support line.

Log Monitoring

Log files from your business applications contains very detailed and valuable information when trying to understand the health status of the applications. The challenge is that the logs are often spread all around the entire IT environment making the vast amount of information incredibly hard to monitor and to understand.The application and system log files provide information that you need to be able to quickly access to identify in case of any security breaches.

The op5 Logserver extension collect logs form all systems in one place providing a good overview and search and filter capabilities, thus making the data more understandable and potential problems easier to spot. op5 Logserver Extension makes it possible to configure automatic alarms to be sent out from logfilters or log events showing any abnormalities. From the information security view, correctly collected logdata in a central server is essential in case of an intrusion, making it pointless to tamper with log files in order to hide tracks.