Application Performance Monitoring (APM) with Paessler PRTG

The acronym APM can stand for both Application Performance Management and Application Performance Monitoring. Application Performance Management strives to detect and diagnose complex application performance problems to maintain an expected level of service; it is "the translation of IT metrics into business meaning." Here we deal with Application Performance Monitoring as a subset of any IT monitoring effort in networks of variable size.

Every employee in any organization needs applications to do their daily work. Monitoring these desktop applications or web apps is important to ensure that all processes and activities continue to run smoothly. Since users rely on applications of different types to do their daily work, the success of a business is thus directly proportional to the performance of its applications. Therefore, Application Performance Monitoring is critical for any organization to deliver and maintain a superior user experience.

Application Performance Monitoring involves monitoring both the technical performance of the application and the performance as perceived by the users. Because today's applications run on a highly distributed infrastructure, all of their components are in constant flux and very complex to monitor. Therefore, useful APM software must look across all critical parts of an application to facilitate troubleshooting and manage application performance.

APM tools are a dime a dozen these days. Ideally, one should rely on a tool that supports - or smoothly performs in the background - the following useful functions or steps:

• Perhaps the most important characteristic of a good APM tool is the measurement of the performance of each request and each response. Together, they are called a transaction.
• An application may be slow because there is a problem with one of its dependencies, such as the database, the web server, or caching. Therefore, it is important to monitor not only the application but also all its dependencies.
• Data and any errors in the application logs are critical to quickly troubleshoot application performance issues. While one can manually access all the numerous server logs through other means, it is helpful to have all the records in a central dashboard.
• It's equally important to keep an eye on the server's CPU and memory usage, especially if one wants to automatically scale applications according to traffic.

Paessler PRTG for better Application Performance Monitoring

Help keep your applications and application servers up and running by identifying and fixing potential problems early on. Preventive monitoring is only possible if admins monitor applications comprehensively. Monitoring the availability and status of each component of an application is the only way to achieve high availability.

Comprehensive monitoring of applications and their associated components by Paessler PRTG provides the basis for keeping an eye not only on the overall status but also on the statuses of any subcomponents - as well as the comprehensive functionality of the entire network.

Paessler PRTG comes with numerous database, web server, and mail server sensors:

• PRTG supports monitoring of all major SQL Server applications out of the box. In addition, PRTG can integrate virtually any database addressable via OLE DB (Object Linking and Embedding, Database) or ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) into application monitoring using the ADO SQL v2 sensor.
• The third group of standard applications found in most companies are web servers. As the basis for both Internet and Intranet sites, these applications also have extremely high availability and performance requirements. PRTG covers the most important representatives in this area as well. PRTG automatically detects IIS and Apache web servers using a whole range of ready-made sensors.
• Communication via e-mail still forms the backbone of almost all corporate communication. In addition to the standards for the various email servers, PRTG includes on-board tools for monitoring blacklists or round-trip sensors for monitoring the complete send and receive cycle of an email.

Nowadays, applications are becoming more complex and distributed due to the use of technology. Therefore, it is necessary to monitor the performance of an application to increase the satisfaction of the end users. Paessler PRTG comes with a huge list of suitable sensors for virtually any problem. And a 30-day trial allows you to test PRTG thoroughly and in full before deciding to buy. Sounds fantastic? We think so too.