subject: Web Application Monitoring Solutions [print this page] To deliver on business expectations of application performance, operations teams have traditionally spent large sums of their budgets and extensive amounts of time to implement resource, application and web monitoring tools. Application monitoring refers to the software packages (Web servers such as Microsoft Internet Information Services, Sun-Netscape Alliance iPlanet, and Apache; application servers such as BEA WebLogic, Apache Tomcat, and IBM WebSphere; databases such as Oracle and SQL) that provide the integrated development environment (IDE) for mission-critical e-business applications.
With these tools, operations managers are able to gain a good understanding of their site health, receive quick notification of component level problems, and keep resource availability high. This approach works well for controlled mainframe and client/server environments in which the resource health provides a clear indication of the performance delivered to the end users However, in today's complex multi-tiered Web environments, unpredictable traffic volume and user mix as well as frequent application level changes and upgrades make it impossible to directly correlate the underlying resource health to the end-user performance delivered.
In a nutshell, resource and application monitoring can help operations personnel in several ways:
Identify a resource problem
Help determine the root cause of the problem through the use of cohesive correlation rules
Help identify who to call to deal with the problem
Usually, operations personnel are only able to determine that they have a problem and that more investigation is required to determine the exact cause and appropriate resolution. The actual impact on the user community is much more abstract and may never be known, much less improved. Moreover, the process of correlating large datasets from various inconsistent sources without first understanding the end-user impact is highly cumbersome and could exponentially increase the operational expenditure without yielding any website performance enhancements or top-line business benefits.
