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New to APM - What type of things can you monitor?

Hi,

I am new to APM and am trying to figure out how to configure it to work for us. What we are trying to do is monitor our custom application for errors. Our application outputs everything to a log file. We were having issues doing this with APM so we tried to use APM to monitor the event viewer.

What we have found out is APM can report up and down messages, but that is it.

Is there a way to get more details in the alert emails? Like what the error is?

If this is not possible then is it possible to have an alert trigger a custom report to be emailed that will show this information? I am just throwing around some ideas since I am not as familiar with the product yet.

Also is there maybe some custom packages that could be installed into Orion that would do what we are wanting?

Thanks in advanced,

-Adam

  • Along with log files, are the error messages for this custom application also stored in a backend database? If so, you might be able to create an application template with an SQL Server User Experience Monitor and create an alert that triggers based on the result.

    As you referenced, you can definitely have a custom report e-mailed as an alert action. As long as you make the report available online to the DirectLink account, you'd simply use the E-mail a Web Page action to accomplish this.

    Hopefully, one of these suggestions are an option for you. Good luck!

  • The logs are not stored in a databases. Thank you for the response.

    One more question, how can you montitor that a program is running? Is WMI the best way to do this?

  • Hello ajdurr,
    if you need to monitor process and you don't need to monitor virtual memory, best monitor would be SNMP process monitor. It's more effective than WMI process monitor and it gives you up/down status, CPU and physical memory consumption for process.

    Regarding your log files monitoring, best solution would be using custom Windows Script monitor. Using this monitor you can write custom VB or JS script that scans log files for errors and report those errors in "Message" field. See this page for help.

  • Thank you! I tried the snmp process monitor and it is working great! It is reporting offline when machines are first turned on though.

    If a node is offline and then comes online, is there a way to not have the application get polled with the snmp process monitor immediately? Because the application hasnt had time yet to come on after the computer is up.

  • After turning on the SNMP process monitor I noticed some of the nodes to go offline and online every 30 minutes or so. What type of settings could be tuned to make these errors disappear? I checked the nodes and the process is still running during the outage.

    Sometimes every 5 minutes.

  • Hello ajdurr,

    Application polling is independent on target node going up/down. You set polling frequency for application and then this application is polled every X seconds independently on target node status. So if you turn on target computer and polling fits just to time when node is up but application is not yet started, it reports application as down. This is by design and you can't change this behavior.

    Regarding nodes going up/down every 30 minutes  - do you mean computers or monitored applications? If target computer is under heavy load so it is unable to reply to SNMP request then it can come up as down in APM. If computer is ok but applications are still reported down even if they are running it may be some issue with APM. In that case you should open a support ticket for this.

  • I was referring to the monitored application. Sorry.

    The node stays green, but the monitored application will go down for 10 minutes. During this time we can still see that the application is running and get to the machine. Have you guys noticed any issues like this with monitored applications? What is the recommended settings for a monitored application?

  • Hello ajdurr,
    what you describe should not happen if application is still running. If you are sure that application did not for example restart itself from time to time then you should open a support ticket for this. Our support can verify that your setup is correct and that you don't have any network issues or so.

    There is no configuration that could affect this up/down switching. You can configure various thresholds but when application is up, monitor should report it up as well.