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New to Application Monitoring

I'm a network engineer who is trying to get my head around application monitoring and I'm quite sure where to start. I have a good understanding of SNMP and when it comes to using it to monitor network resources (routers, switches..etc), I have no problem understanding what information I can retrieve via SNMP and how to interpret that data. Application monitoring is a whole new animal. I don't have an issue understanding the interfaces to poll for data (WMI..etc) but...

it just seems to me that although the tools exist in APM to query nodes for information that may affect application performance.....the real skill will be determining what information to gather and how to interpret this data. I understand the templates, but someone has to build them. Just pasting in a community based template, doesn't tell you what relevance the components have to the application or the OS..some are obvious, some are not. My guess is that while a DBA might know what performance metrics are important for an SQL instance, he may know nothing about AD. A dumb network engineer is not likely to understand either..so..it seems to me if you going to use this tool effectively, your going to either have to have a wide range of system and application experience, or your going to have to engage folks that do. Has anyone else wrestled with this? Is there a place for newbies in APM to get started?

Thanks!

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Donald_Francis

The admin guide is a good place to start. Its a long read but will give you a good fundamental knowledge.

Also, to answer your other question. In my experience the app owners are the best people to go to for that info. A lot of times you will know how their app works better then they do but it seems best to lay the responsibility for finding the info out on them.

andyb

Thanks Donald, I've read the manual, but there isn't enough detail to understand some of this. For example when I test a template against an application on a server, I get error messages that the test fails. I've verified WMI according to the WMI troubleshooting guide and it all appears to be set up correctly. Now I can post a question on Thwack (and I will)and probably stumble through this and eventually get it working, but...I'd really like to know how to de-bug myself. Where is the documentation that helps me debug this? Are the different error messages documented somewhere? Is there a process to debug these tests that's documented? If I'm making a WMI query to a server, is there a debug mechanism with Windows to see the request come in and see how the WMI interface on the server handles the request? I'm not looking for someone to hold my hand through all of this, I just need someone to point me in the direction where I can find these sorts of answers and documentation.

Also, thanks for the second answer about who should "own" this piece of net management, this seems to make sense to me. I'd be interested in others viewpoints on this question. Thanks!!!!

RogerWong

Andy,

You said that you tested an application template against a Windows server node and that several of the component monitors failed. Was this a template that contained WMI performance counter components?

If so, what I would do in this situation is look at the "WQL query" of some of those failed component monitors, and find the counters they were trying to read. I would then run wbemtest from the Orion APM server to see if I could connect to the remote node and access the same counters using Microsoft's tool. (You probably did this if you followed the WMI troubleshooting guide.)

If I can read them with wbemtest, but not with Orion APM, that's something I would open a support ticket for, because that's a sign there is something more going on.

I would also consider making new versions of those templates that use "Performance Counter" type component monitors instead of the "WMI" type component monitors. We added those to address complaints that monitoring counters through WMI was 'finicky'. With the Performance Counter component monitors, you only need to open ports 445 and 139, so it's more firewall friendly. I'd make a template that contained just one of the counters I wanted to monitor, and if it worked, I'd go ahead and add the rest to the template.

re: Error Messages

Generally, if it's not an Orion APM error, the error is coming from the application. If I were an expert in those apps, I would probably know what they mean. But, I'm not, so I resort to searching for them on Google. For example, if I test an Oracle UE component monitor and it spits back "ORA-12514 TNS:listener..." as an error, I Google search for that and find: http://ora-12514.ora-code.com/ . Which tells me I may have the wrong service name for my Oracle UE monitor.

shanepj

We have been using APM for a little while to perform application monitoring. What I have found works fairly well regarding the expertise question is to engage the application groups. I initially tried simply setting up a meeting and asking what they cared about and received almost no good input. So I took a different route that has worked very good for us.

1. Check to see what the group already monitors. Even if they have nothing "officially" set up for monitoring I found most groups had little scripts and other things they do to check the applications. I then worked on setting up monitoring to do the things they were doing with the multitude of scripts and simple tools the group had. This gave me the ability to compare the info we were getting to what they were getting and hopefully give them confidence.

2. I set up some basic monitoring in APM for the application we were working on and then set up a meeting to show it to them. The best example I have for this is I took a basic SQL Server query I found on Microsoft's site. I set that up as a user experience monitor pointing to a test database. Once I could show the dba's how it could run the queries they started getting excited to use the tool. That started the ball rolling.

3. I walked through setting up a template with the group and specifically showing them browsing a server for processes or performance counters etc... This let them see the additional stuff we could do.

The biggest thing I found I needed to make them trust what we could do for them. Once I was able to get them comfortable with the tool I received a lot more input from the groups. Without the application group’s knowledge there is no way I could have known enough to set up valid monitoring.