Application Monitoring

Any IT infrastructure exists solely to support the activities of the organisation

using it. Functionality is provided to users by software applications; whilst
monitoring the availability and performance of underlying infrastructure will go
some way toward ensuring that they function correctly, if applications themselves
can be directly monitored then a more complete and accurate picture emerges.
Much of the activity in the ESM marketplace in recent years has been concentrated
around application monitoring. Infrastructure monitoring is now a relatively
mature activity dominated by a small number of established players with official or
de facto standards in place. In contrast, application monitoring is a rapidly growing
sector with hundreds of vendors providing a plethora of mainly proprietary
solutions to satisfy demand created by organisations looking to improve the quality
of application service delivery. The adoption of a service orientated IT delivery
model (where services delivered to users are the focus, as opposed to how well
individual elements of the IT infrastructure are working) is further fuelling the
interest in application monitoring and encouraging further new entrants into this
marketplace.
Although few if any standards have emerged in the area of application monitoring,
some common principles and techniques are, at least, used by all solution vendors.
Most if not all applications operate via transactions. A transaction is an activity or
series of linked activities, which are performed using an application and which
deliver a useful result. Examples of transactions include performing a search via a
Web search engine, creating a new customer record in a CRM system, running an
online management report, making a credit card payment via a secure website and
so on.
As discussed earlier, modern IT infrastructures tend to be highly distributed with
tens, hundreds or even thousands of computers interlinked via networks being used
to deliver applications to users. It is the norm for the successful execution of
application transactions to be reliant upon multiple infrastructure components and
network connections, all of which must be functioning effectively. Applications
may also be reliant upon other applications, which themselves have their own
infrastructure and perhaps application dependencies. Take the example of a Webbased application provided by an airline which allows customers to view schedules
and book seats. The infrastructure which supports the application is as follows: -

A typical transaction would be to request information on available flights and

prices for a specified origin, destination and date as the first step in booking a
flight. The sequence of operations is as follows: 1. User enters address for website in their Web browser
2. User selects link to book flights form (page); form is loaded from
Webserver into Web browser
3. User enters From and To airport, date and whether it is a one way or
return flight; click on Search Flights
4. Information entered into form is sent to application server which in turn
issues a select statement against the back end database to find all data
matching the criteria entered into the book flights form
5. Data matching the selection criteria are sent back to the application server by
the database server
6. Data are formatted for display in the book flights webpage by a script
running on the application server

7. Formatted Web page containing requested data is uploaded to the Web

server
8. Users Web browser displays updated web page with available flights, times
and prices
So, even a relatively simple everyday transaction is made up of a number of steps
and reliant upon a number of different pieces of infrastructure and software, all
intercommunicating over a network. Each of these components is monitored using
the appropriate element manager (server hardware), agent & management server
(server operating system, database, application and webserver processes), network
monitoring tool (network devices, topology & connectivity) and agentless
monitoring tool (flight booking website availability). To complete the monitoring
picture, it is necessary to monitor the individual steps making up the overall
transaction to ensure that: a) Each transaction step completes successfully
b) Each transaction step completes within the required time limit
c) The overall transaction completes successfully
d) The overall transaction completes within the required time limit
Typically, a number of approaches may be taken to monitor the application
transaction. One way is to use a robot to periodically perform the transaction in
order to simulate what is being done by real users. If this synthetically-generated
transaction fails or takes too long, then it is reasonable to assume that the same
problem would be experienced by a real user.
Another approach would be to install a piece of agent software onto the PC from
where the user is accessing the application, and to monitor the stream of
instructions being processed by the PC operating system as the transaction is
executed. An agent could also be installed on the application server and work in a
similar manner. The advantage of this approach is that all transactions being
processed by the application server are visible, as opposed to the far lower number
of transactions that would be executed on a single users PC. These approaches are
known as client and server instrumentation.
Another approach again is to use a network probe to capture data being transmitted
over the network and deduce what transactions are being performed, by whom,

from which locations, how long they are taking and whether they are successful
from the captured data.
In each case, the monitoring technology used needs to be configured to recognise
the application transactions to be monitored. In the case of synthetic transaction
generation, this is done by recording transactions executed by a real user; in the
case of client or server instrumentation or network data capture, this can be done
either by performing sample transactions on an otherwise quite server/network
infrastructure, or, as is more common nowadays letting the technology capture data
for an extended period so that it can learn which transactions are taking place
and whet they do from the information contained within the captured data.
The choice of approach for application monitoring will depend on many factors
such as infrastructure platforms used, application architecture, number of users,
transaction volumes, size of network and others considerations, not least price.
Once configured, the chosen monitoring tool will generally need to be integrated
into the incumbent framework application (if present). Alternatively, most
application monitoring vendors supply their own full-capable management server,
administration and event browser consoles.