Getting started with setting up applications for monitoring

As an application specialist, you want to monitor web applications that are critical to your organization and that require direct and immediate visibility. You set up the applications for monitoring so that the IT Operations can identify, diagnose, and help resolve issues before they impact your organization's end users.

To set up application monitoring, use the following guidelines:

Learning resources for application monitoring

Getting-started-with-application-monitoring

Getting-started-with-synthetic-transaction-monitoring

Installing agents for automatically discovered applications

After your system administrator installs and configures the App Visibility server components and TrueSight Presentation Server, you install App Visibility agents for Java, or App Visibility agents for .NET, or both, on the application servers of your web application.

App Visibility agents for Java require you to update Java options according to the application server type, and to grant Java 2 permissions to the App Visibility agent. For details, see the Configuring App Visibility agents for Java after installation topic.

After you install the agents, open the TrueSight console (the Administration > App Visibility Agents page) to verify that they are running.

App Visibility Agents page in the TrueSight console

For details, see Viewing-App-Visibility-agent-status-and-properties.

Installation resources for automatically discovered applications

App Visibility server componentsTrueSight Presentation ServerApp Visibility agents for JavaApp Visibility agents for .NET

Examining automatically discovered applications

Soon after you install the App Visibility agents, data is displayed in the TrueSight console. Examine the automatically discovered applications through the Configuration > Applications page. For details, see the following topics:

Tip

Examine the discovered applications and events periodically to ensure that the data that is important and relevant to you and your applications is reflected in the results.

Consider the following needs of your environment and make adjustments as needed:

How many requests are run on the monitored server? How many of the requests have breaches or errors?
How many breaches are for memory or CPU (which send events more frequently)?

You might have the adjust the heap size or modify the database retention settings:

Modifying automatically discovered applications

You can make the following adjustments to automatically discovered applications to influence the data that you collect and see in the TrueSight console.

Modifying application discovery
Modifying event thresholds
Modifying agent policies

Modifying application discovery

Automatic application discovery is driven by the way end users access and request services from your business applications. End users access the web application through a URL, and App Visibility provides a way to name applications by identifying common URL construction and patterns.

You can configure application discovery so that you can group requests with a common purpose under one application name, and separate requests with different purposes accordingly. For details, see Configuring-application-discovery.

Modifying event thresholds

In the TrueSight console, you can configure performance and availability event thresholds based on service-level agreement (SLA) parameters to ensure that you meet your obligations for user satisfaction. You can also configure if you want to receive notification for performance and availability events. Threshold settings apply to all transactions in an automatically discovered application or application with end-user monitoring.

You can set the levels of events for application performance and availability:

Minor, indicating a possible problem
Critical, indicating that the problem requires immediate attention.

For details, see Configuring-event-thresholds-SLAs-for-automatically-discovered-applications.

Transaction tab of the Application Configuration page in the TrueSight console

Modifying agent policies

A policy defines how the App Visibility agent behaves and operates. While you can control some of the agent functionality by configuring event thresholds (SLAs), agent policies provide you with a way to fine tune or change data collection methods to better suit your environment.

Modify the agent policy to make the following adjustments:

Concealing sensitive data recorded by the App Visibility agents
Reducing the number of similar requests
Adjusting the percentage of sampled requests: Agent overhead
Collecting data for stack traces that exceeded thresholds
Persisting tagged transactions
Disabling end-user monitoring in App Visibility

Note

Changes to any of the parameters in the policy files can have a sizable impact on the footprint of the App Visibility agent and on the App Visibility collector’s scalability and database size. BMC recommends consulting with App Visibility support before changing any of the parameter values.

For details, see Managing-App-Visibility-agent-and-confidentiality-policies.

Creating manual applications

With BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management, you can manually create applications in the TrueSight console by creating application models. Manual applications can include the following components:

Groups and devices that are synchronized from Infrastructure Management
Devices that are synchronized from TrueSight App Visibility Manager
Manually created groups
Application discovered by manually setting up end-user monitoring

The status of a manual application is based on the event conditions that are specified with the application nodes.

When you create an application, you add devices or groups to the application model. The devices or groups that you add are displayed as nodes model. You can connect the nodes and establish their hierarchy. When you click a node in the application model, details of the node are displayed in a configuration pane at the bottom of the page

For details, see Creating-an-application-manually.

Installation resources for manual applications

Infrastructure Management componentsTrueSight Presentation Server

Adding synthetic transaction monitoring to an application

You can monitor synthetic transactions to predict application health and user experience. Synthetic transaction monitoring enables you to manage the performance and reliability of your applications by executing complex business transactions and monitoring performance and functional behavior.

Install the Synthetic Transaction Execution Adapter (TEA) Agent and Silk Performer agent on each server. Together, these components schedule and run your scripts, which contain one or more application transactions.

Installation resources for synthetic transaction monitoring

Transaction Execution Adapter (TEA) Agent

Silk Performer agent Installation Guide

Setting up dashboards for application monitoring

After you install and configure all the application monitoring components and start collecting data, you can set up dashboards to provide end-to-end visibility for IT Operations operators. As the application specialist, you know which applications and which metrics you want to pay special attention. You can create dashboards and share or copy them with operators.

For example, you can create a dashboard for a single application, showing dashlets with information about the application's performance and availability. The dashboard can include one or more of the following dashlets:

Applications dashlet (select one application)
Application Health - Synthetic dashlet
Application Server Health dashlet (monitor one or more servers used by your application)
Application View dashlet
Applications Overview - Synthetic dashlet
Impacted Users dashlet
Top Real Transactions dashlet

You can also create a dashboard that shows the status of all your applications, which can include one or more of the following dashlets:

Applications dashlet (select all applications)
End User Experience Metrics dashlet (select all applications)
End User Overview dashlet (select all applications)
Application Server Health dashlet (monitor servers used by one or more of your applications)

Click here to see the full list of application monitoring dashlets.