This section discusses how to create an overall monitoring strategy, including
monitoring to understand these dimensions:
- The response times perceived by end users. Is your response time meeting your end user requirements?
- The basic health of the systems that participate in an end-to-end user request. Is a problem with one or more systems causing slow performance?
- The resource usage of applications. Do you understand the application flow that is servicing end user requests?
- Monitoring end user response time
- Monitoring end user response time is an external perspective of how the
overall Web site performs from an end user view and identifies how long the
response time is for an end user. From this perspective, it is important to
understand the load and response time on your site. To monitor at this level,
many industry monitoring tools, for example, Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction
Performance, support you to inject and monitor synthetic transactions, helping
you identify when your Web site experiences a problem.
- Monitoring overall system health
- Monitoring overall system health is of fundamental importance to understand
the health of every system involved that includes Web servers, application
servers, databases, back end systems, and any other systems critical to running
your Web site. If any system has a problem, it might have a rippling effect
and cause slow servlet response time. IBM and several other business partners
leverage the WebSphere APIs to capture this kind of performance data and to
incorporate this data into an overall 24-by-7 monitoring solution across multiple
products. WebSphere Application Server provides Performance Monitoring Infrastructure
(PMI) data to help monitor the overall health of the WebSphere Application
Server environment. PMI provides average statistics on WebSphere Application
Server resources, application resources, and system metrics. Many statistics
are available in WebSphere Application Server, and you might want to understand
the ones that most directly measure your site to detect problems
- Monitoring application flow
- This topic gives you a basic strategy for monitoring with an understanding
of the application view. This information provides an understanding of how
the application flow satisfies the end user request.