Importance of Application Server Monitoring and Site Performance Issues Why should you regularly perform application server monitoring? To determine:

An application’s response time.

Whether the application is stable and to lower the number of failures when the application is under an increased load.

See what the maximum transaction/user load is for an application and – if necessary – to increase its capacity.

The different types of testing you can perform with such tools as an application performance monitor and others are:

Benchmarking. How are your transactions’ response times doing?

Testing the load. Usually performed at a pre-determined load.

Testing the application’s capacity. What are the application’s failure rates and response time values?

A stress test. What is the application’s breaking point? Increase the user load slowly until the application breaks.

Want to know where any memory leaks might be occurring? SOAK the application. Work with performance monitoring software to test the system with a large load over a long period of time (such as from several hours to several weeks).

Perform a fail-over test. Such tests are performed in order to reproduce those times when an application is likely to fail and to check the application’s behavior when in that situation.

Issues that could be contributing or causing problems in performance include (but certainly are not limited to):

High loads within the processor. Just like about any system, if there are too many things to do, or if the jobs are too large, the application, processor of software can’t keep up, leading to performance issues. Regular application server monitoring can help prevent this problem.

Errors on the lines, slow lines or too many users on line. Increase bandwidth or remove network bottlenecks to help alleviate this problem.

Your server is consuming a large amount of memory. Your application performance monitor should alert you when this happens. If your application’s performance goes way down, check for how much memory it’s consuming.

Simultaneous requests, processes and threads. Having all these threads running shouldn’t have an effect on them, but they can get tangled together, creating performance problems.

So this is why application server monitoring is so critical: you can catch issues before they have time to create havoc. Read below for a few – and we mean just a very few – of the things you should monitor regularly.

Memory

Memory pages per second

Connection pools

CPU interrupts per second

Page faults per second

Disk queue length

Total Network bytes per second

Network output queue length

Processor usage

Hits per second

Active sessions

Garbage Collection (the GC Heap) An application performance monitor can analyze and – of course – monitor how an application is doing. It can help you pinpoint one or more issues that may be affecting performance, allowing you to fix problems before they become huge. Resolving issues speeds up, meaning shorter downtimes/shorter periods when performance lags. Author Box:

AppDynamics is the leading provider of application performance management for modern application architectures. That means not just the kinds of old-school app environments that existed 5 years ago, but the new ones: distributed, agile, and extremely hard to manage. They’re sometimes in the cloud, sometimes in the physical data center—and always causing headaches for ops and dev teams.