Application Performance Monitoring

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.