Troubleshooting Quality of Experience Problems with Server & Application Monitor
With the recently launched SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM), you can now get a view into the application's quality of experience using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) analysis. Most often, we tend to blame the network when an application issue occurs – whether it’s related to availability or overall performance.
To really know if your application is the culprit, you will have to monitor these essential metrics like network response time and application response time or time to first byte. These metrics are broken out by application, and provide an at-a-glance ability to correlate and identify the source of application issues. If it is indeed an application issue, you can drill down further and look at the health of the server hardware where the application is running. You can monitor the server response time and other metrics to pinpoint that it was in fact an application which is having issues.
You may be using NPM to monitor the quality of service for a critical application like SQL Server. Network Performance Monitor can give you insights to a few server resource issues, like CPU and Memory performance. If all looks good, there may still be an issue with your SQL server. Here is an example of how you could use Server & Application Monitor (SAM) to drill-down further and identify database performance issues.
- After discovering your application environment in your node details page you will see the applications monitored. Here you can see that SQL Server is having a problem.
2. Drilling further into the SQL server with SAM will show that the lock requests/second is higher than it should be.
3. Clicking the metric or the component will tell you that the value is high and the high wait time could be the reason for the poor quality of service. Expert knowledge for this metric in SAM will help you with remediation guidance on how to fix the problem.
Whether you’re monitoring file transfer apps, web services, social networking apps, messaging, email, database, and other applications using NPM, you can leverage out-of-the-box templates in SAM or templates on thwack to monitor the complete application performance. This document has a list of applications that you can monitor using both Server & Application Monitor and the QoE feature of Network Performance Monitor.
