Server and Application Monitoring

Servers and Application Infrastructure

IT operations teams need the ability to monitor and rapidly troubleshoot the performance of server, virtual servers and application infrastructure together with the network infrastructure.  SevOne gives IT operations teams complete visibility into physical, virtual, and application infrastructure through one integrated platform. No matter the data collection source, SevOne builds a dynamic baseline of normal behavior for all performance indicators, and sets threshold-based alerts for when actual performance levels deviate from their historical norms. This enables IT operations staff to monitor and proactively manage their application infrastructure using the same reporting consoles and workflows used to manage their network services.

Virtual Servers
SevOne VM Monitoring enables IT operations staff to monitor and proactively manage their virtual infrastructure using the same reporting consoles and workflows used to manage their network and physical servers. VM Monitoring adds to the agent-less server and application monitoring capabilities available via SNMP, WMI, JMX, and process monitoring. The SevOne VM monitoring plugin and VM Browser uses the VMware vSphere API to dynamically discover the ESX hosts associated with a vCenter. An administrative user can view and select the host devices and their guest VM objects for monitoring; new hosts are automatically discovered as they are added to a vCenter. Key performance indicators are then collected from vCenter and the ESX servers. 

Java Applications
SevOne supports monitoring of Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) applications and infrastructure via the JMX (Java Management Extensions) API.   Any key performance indicator exposed by the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) or a Java application can be selected from a GUI-based configuration screen to be monitored. Common JMX or MBean indicators can describe characteristics like per-component transaction rates, per-thread memory and CPU utilization, and thread and connection pool utilization. These key metrics are used to ensure the correct operation of large multi-tier Java platforms like Apache Tomcat, IBM WebSphere, Oracle WebLogic, Red Hat JBoss, SAP and many others.

Key uses cases include proactive application monitoring by the operations team to rapidly identify and isolate potential problems before they impact business operations.  From the SevOne console, the IT operations team can graph the Java application or infrastructure metrics with bandwidth utilization and server metrics to provide complete visibility into a potential or actual performance problem. The ability to detach and pdf reports then facilitates a rapid workflow and handoff to the business application team to resolve the problem before business operations are impacted.

Apache Web Servers 
SevOne enables IT operations staff to monitor and proactively manage their apache web server using the same reporting consoles and workflows used to manage their network. SevOne provides visibility into key Apache performance indicators such as, page availability, thread utilization, session state, and server cache utilization to name a few. SevOne helps rapidly identify and isolate potential problems before they impact key web applications, enabling administrators to take action before users experience performance degradation, and to effectively optimize performance and availability. 

SNMP and Process Monitoring
SevOne monitors CPU, memory and the number of instances of each process. SevOne uses the Host Resources MIB data to alert when the DNS process stops running or when MYSQL process uses too much of the CPU and triggers a threshold violation.

SevOne can baseline process and memory utilization. For example: If a server CPU triggers a threshold violation, Process Monitoring can diagnose which process running on the server has the highest utilization. Similarly, if memory spikes, SevOne can report on which process consumes the most memory on the server.

WMI
Since Windows Servers have limited support for monitoring via SNMP, Windows server management teams tend to favor the collection and reporting of key indicators via the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI).

SevOne’s WMI plug-in is able to collect all or a subset of server and server application statistics available through the WMI API which is available on Windows 2000 and onwards. Microsoft server applications including Exchange, Active Directory, IIS and Sharepoint have characteristics which can be monitored using this approach. 

Please contact SevOne to discuss the best approach for monitoring your enterprise server and application infrastructure.