Getting started with application monitoring

Application monitoring and management provides you, the IT Operations operator, with a visual representation of the business applications in your environment, and the ability to identify and diagnose issues. The color-coded and importance-ranked Applications page enables you to determine which applications require attention. You can drill-down to any application from the Applications page and view details on the Application Monitoring page. From the Application Monitoring page, you see all the information — transactions, application model, events, and devices — filtered by, and in the context of, the selected application. You can see the relationship between application components and understand the impact of events on your users.

Learning resources for applications

Application-context

Application-models

Application data providers

While any user can view application data and drill down to diagnose the root cause of a problem, no data is available until applications are in the system. An application specialist can manually create applications through Infrastructure Management, or use the automatically generated applications through App Visibility:

With Infrastructure Management, the application specialist creates an application model in the Operations Management console. The model is a graphical representation of an application and the relationship of the infrastructure components required to support or provide data to that application.
With App Visibility, applications are automatically discovered and application models are automatically generated. The application specialist can fine tune and configure application discovery rules.
The application specialist can configure applications of any kind (automatically discovered or manually created) to provide synthetic transaction data, which help predict application performance and availability.

Identify problematic applications

From the Applications page (Monitoring > Applications) in the Operations Management console, you can see a high-level, real-time view of all your applications. You can weigh applications by importance (high, medium, low) or view them by the severity of the application events (critical, major, minor, warning, info, OK).

Example of the Applications page, sorted by importance

You can also set up dashlets to more closely monitor specific applications. From the dashlet library, select one or more of the following dashlets:

Application View: Monitors the health and performance of live traffic and synthetic executions of an application
Impacted Users or Executions: Number of impacted real users compared to the total number of users, or the number of impacted synthetic executions compared to the total number of executions, over the last 24 hours

Diagnose an application problem

Select an application to delve into information and events that are all in the context of that application.

Application View

The Application View acquires data from App Visibility to present a holistic end-to-end view of an application. The Application View represents the selected application's logical architecture. Each tier represents the aggregated performance and availability of its member types: real users, synthetic executions, network, and back-end tiers.

With the Application View, you can pinpoint the application, date, time, and problem that you want to investigate.

Application model

The application model acquires data from Infrastructure Management and App Visibility to display a topological application model and quickly help determine the probable cause of impacting events.

Events and devices

You can view events and devices data from Infrastructure Management and App Visibility to display the events and devices that are associated with the specific application.