Why is application X not performing according to our business needs?

A application can be 100% down, run with unacceptable response time or produce incorrect data. How do you monitor and identify problems directly related to your business critical applications? Using op5 Monitor you get control over your applications performance, can minimize down time and shorten the time needed to fix problems, becoming proactive in your IT management.

The challenge: Turn application down-time to up-time

Trying to list the applications that cause the most problems is an challenging task and all organizations have their own lists of 6 business critical applications that are not allowed to go down. If the application and the related services go down it directly hurt the business. The challenge of increasing the applications up-time is to limit down-time. To limit downtime we need to be in control and able to look into the details of how the applications are performing.

According to Gartner, at least 80% of the time fixing a problem is focused on identifying where the actual core problem is. Once we have identified where and what the problem is, the solution is often quite simple and fast to fix.

op5 Monitor is an active network monitoring tool that helps identifying the source of the problem in the virtual or physical environment and as such provides strong clues about resolving them. This can help you save up to 80% of valuable time when needing to fix problems.

Modern IP based applications vs. old legacy system applications

In the old days applications were confined to run on one or multiple similar closed systems. This created a need for extremely detailed information on the particular single application. It was common practice to monitor hundreds or even thousands of highly specific parameters in each application and by that assuring 100% control of the single system.

Looking at today’s IP based applications they run fundamentally different, both in their architecture and in the design in which they are implemented. The applications are built up by many sub applications and third party services that provide the organization with the IT solutions needed to perform the every day tasks of a modern business.

Addressing the challenge from a two way approach

op5 Monitor uses multiple parallel monitoring to assure performance and functionality on your applications. They can be divided into four levels:

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

1. Hardware/infrastructure checks

A slow fan, an almost full disk, a broken RAM, a congested LAN or WAN connection will all greatly impair a applications’ performance and function.

2. Included processes

Check that IMAP process, the POP3 process, the NDS Process etc. are operational and running is a must to know that the application will work properly. This applies to both the system and user perspectives.

3. Specific Checks

op5 Monitor has a rich set of specific application checks for different purposes. In general they all have a common purpose of initiating an action/query>check the response>measure the overall transaction time. Examples of these specific checks are for Databases (MSSQL, MYSQL, Oracle etc), Citrix, Email /Exchange etc. For a complete list please contact us.

4. End to end service/application checks

As a complementary way to assure full quality we can also create complete standard based scripts for a fixed process containing multiple steps. As an example: testing an web shop order process, op5 Monitor can access the order application with a user name and password, get confirmation that the authentication system is operational, place a test order, get the order acknowledgement back, read the order to see that it is OK and finally time the complete transaction. This test is executed every 3 minutes and will tell you that the application is functional from a 100% end user perspective.

The “Business critical application” is consist of the different objects that together builds 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 uptime for the applications.

In order to reduce downtime it is imperative to be able to have the complete picture. This enables you to fast identify the root cause of a problem when or even before a service or application is malfunctioning.

Service group view of a generic “Mail service”

In order to secure quality for this Email service, op5 Monitor checks all levels:

• The necessary infrastructure

• The servers

• The necessary DNS

• The WAN & LAN

• The IMAP, POP3 and SNMP service

Any errors or quality degradation will automatically generate an alarm and clearly show if it affects the general application Email.

Automatic SLA follow up and reports

A control of your applications performance in correlation to specific SLAs is directly available over a simple web access. These reports can further be configured to be automatically generate and distributed directly from the op5 system via email, keeping management informed. Read more about SLA monitoring and available reports in op5 Monitor.

Adding LogServer Extension for detailed application log monitoring

Data logs are in general considered to be the most granulate source of detailed data. The best part is that it is already there and in your IT systems today. The worst part is that it contains so much data and is distributed over a wide range of devices that makes it almost impossible to use for day to day application monitoring.

op5 LogServer extension addresses the following key challenges:

• Centralizes all logs from all environments into one central log storage
• Enables smart and easy search features to filter the data
• Takes huge amounts of data and quickly turn it in to usable and valuable input for your application monitoring.
• You can include log data in op5 Monitor alerts.

The op5 LogServer handles all logs from applications, hardware and traffic devices. That way it enables the possibility for extremely detailed views of an incident from different angles at all levels of the IT infrastructure.

Receive Automatic Alarms from Logs

By setting up filters in the op5 LogServer its possible to identify specific events on a very detailed level and then trigger automatic alarm notification in the op5 Monitor system. The op5 Monitor system then notifies the responsible person or group about the incident. Another great benefit from using logs to trace and monitor applications is that you will never be “out of date” as the log information (i.e. the actual information sent in the logs) is always automatically updated.

Summary

op5 Monitor adds great value by easily and effectively delivering the most important part of monitoring – the tactical overview of your network and applications, enabling fast root cause identification and analysis. Adding op5 LogServer to the application monitoring solution enables quick and very granulate data to the quick and accurate proactive monitoring. It is all done using open standard based formats and tools.