subject: How to Monitor Windows-Based Devices [print this page] While it's very important to be able to properly monitor your servers as a networking professional, quite often what is on those servers is just as important. Applications that are hosted on server environments these days often run mission-critical processes which can be important for day-to-day business. Because of this, one must be mindful of application performance monitoring, often referred to as APM.
It's best to think about APM the same way as you do for network monitoring. As much as we would all like to believe that everything will runs smoothly, that's never really the case in networks. This is also true for applications, so using an APM solution can help to properly mitigate some issues that in the long run might cost you a lot of time and money.
You're probably already burning up a lot of those two resources as it is, so you may want to consider getting a free monitor for your Windows environments, just to see how useful APM can be for you. While these types of free APM tools lack robust features, you'll be able to get a sense of what they can do. You can easily go into one of these programs and set variables in order for the tool to alert you when there may be a potential problem with a specific application.
If APM is something that proves to be valuable, considering implementing an enterprise APM solution to complement your network performance monitoring tools would be a smart idea. Enterprise tools for application monitoring offer everything you could ask for and they are usually pretty simple to set up using existing Windows parameters in order to properly provide data that is useful and that can be used to make sure that there are no potential problems on your system. And of course, no problems mean happy users.
