Monitoring Application performance ???

[Stanley Hopcroft]

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

<Probably_off_topic>

I am writing to request your comments on application performance
monitoring preferably in an Nagios centric environment.

Every one knows what a drag it is to acquit the 'network' of complicity
or blame in slug like application response.

The state of the art seems to be

. L3 stats (RTA, Packet loss ratio etc) are helpful in indicating that
the network performance is Ok, but are not conclusive except in the rare
cases that network response is really poor.

In my experience, with switched LANs and even low speed _uncongested_
WANs, this doesn't happen often.

. Commercial products that generate synthetic transactions (Chariot,
Vital Suite ?) are able to more accurately indicate application
performance but are obviously useless in helping understand why a
particuar workstation is getting poor response.

This is the approach I use with most of my plugins: have the plugin do
what the client does and whine if the server fails to respond in time.

. Commercial application instrumentation for products like Oracle, and
J2EE encironments are able to report on and account for application
response times

Similar products may be able to account for client resources and
activities.

. Commercial RMON2 based network probes (Netscout notably both with
their own products and OEM blades in Cat switches)

These products are located at nodal points in a network (intersection of
flows from clients or servers) and by making some assumptions about the
use of TCP flags in application flows, and by _very quickly_  inspecting
the contents of every packet they receive, are able to get

 - network delay
 - server  delay

or in other words, account for the transaction processing time as seen
by a client as a network component and a server component.

Does anyone have any experience of application performance monitoring or
of any of these products they are willing to share with the list or
privately ?

I think Nag would an immensely attractive product - especially with PHBs
- if there was some way that it could in this matter.

Thank you,

Yours sincerely.

<Probably_off_topic>

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stanley Hopcroft
------------------------------------------------------------------------

'...No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the
continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a
manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes
me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know
for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee...'

from Meditation 17, J Donne.


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