Monitoring application health and performance

The Application View enables you to monitor the health and performance of an application over time. The view helps you pinpoint issues in the application and locate servers where you can begin investigating. You can examine and trend server metrics and correlate server issues with application transaction issues.

The Application View shows color-coded application tiers that represent the status of events in a transaction or on a server. Events are notifications sent by the system under the following conditions:

• Latency violations on a transaction (red tiers)
• Errors on a transaction (red tiers)

• Exceeded performance thresholds. Two types of thresholds are represented:

  • Tolerating thresholds (yellow tiers) are lower values that indicate attention might be required
  • Frustrated thresholds (red tiers) are higher values that indicate a critical situation.

  For more information about event thresholds, see Application-server-events-reference.

This topic provides the following information:

• • Navigating the Application View
  • Monitoring application health and performance
  • Related topics

Navigating the Application View

The following image is an example of the Application View and the navigation elements.

Example of the Application View

_{Click image to enlarge.}

The Application View window contains the following elements:

1. Application list—Select an application from the list of monitored applications.
2. Date picker—Select a date to display monitored data.
3. Time slider—Select a specific time segment of data to examine.
4. User tier—(Integrated with BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring) When associated with an Application Watchpoint, the User tier displays a color-coded status about latency and errors for the end user. This element is not interactive.
5. Application tiers—Select a color-coded tier to examine associated application servers. Statuses reflecting threshold breeches, latency, errors, or a combination on a monitored application server. Application tiers include Web tier, App tier, and Business tier.
   Database tiers are not monitored with BMC Application Diagnostics Agents; data is based on exit point information.
6. Application server—For the selected tier, select an associated application server to examine metric data in graphs below the date servers (not shown in the example). Select more than one server to compare metrics. Each server name is color coded to reflect its status.

For more information about the Application View, see Application-tier-status-and-attributes.

Monitoring application health and performance

Before you begin

• Ensure that each BMC Application Diagnostics Agent is associated with an application and a tier. If the association was not done during Agent installation, then make the association on the Agents window.
• If BMC Application Diagnostics is integrated with BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring, then you can see information for the User tier in the Application View by associating applications with Watchpoints.

To monitor application health and performance with the Application View

1. Log in to the BMC Application Performance Management Console.
2. On the Application Monitoring tab, click the Application View menu.
   The following elements are displayed for a selected application:
   
   • Tiers for the selected application that are color coded according to status. For details about the tier status, see Application-tier-status-and-attributes.
     • Blue—no data
     • Green—no problems
     • Yellow—attention
     • Red—error
   • Results from the last 24 hours
   • The Live Traffic button is selected so that updated results are continually displayed every five minutes
3. From the application list, select the application for which you want to see data.
4. To view data from a specific date or at a specific time or date, click the date picker and then move the slider to a specific time segment of the selected day.
   Click Live Traffic to return to current updates. 
5. To view data about a specific tier, select the tier.
   Application servers associated with the tier are displayed below the Application View.
6. You can do any of the following action to see more information about the application servers:
   
   • To view metrics about a specific application server, select the server. Metrics graphs for the selected server are displayed below the server box. For details about the metrics, see Application-server-metrics-reference. Click more than one server to compare server metrics on the same graphs.
   • If the application server shows issues with latency or errors, select Business Transactions View from the shortcut menu. The Business Transactions window opens, filtered according to the time and date from the Application View.
   • To see details about a specific application server, select Application Servers View from the shortcut menu. The Application Servers window opens, filtered according to the time and date from the Application View.

Related topics

Application-tier-status-and-attributes

Application-server-events-reference