Don’t Fear the App
Digital service providers are being driven by customers into the world of applications. Gone are the days that simple internet access is all you have to provide. The more complex the service, the more value it is to the customer. As SMB customers are embracing managed services, service providers are managing applications. While traditional network services are well defined, most applications are disparate and obtuse. Many of the customers I talk to see a real challenge in application monitoring.
Applications requires the same, if not more, care and feeding that any other tech. Defining services is easier, but components are vast and complex. Application discovery is still a new concept and is not yet 100%. Knowing the availability, performance, and capacity of an application is vital information. Having the heuristics, audit, and log information to troubleshoot allows for quicker resolutions. Performing end-to-end distributed active testing allows for basic verification. Passive activity scanning can ensure you know problems as soon as end-customers do. Mission critical apps need comprehensive monitoring and management. To the tune of the same cost and value of that application deployed.
Applications can be very difficult to manage due to their inherent uniqueness. These custom digital services come in all forms and fashions. From printing queue services to real-time stock trading platforms. This series of blog articles to provide insight on how to plan for monitoring custom applications. Interested providers will be able to leverage these concepts for their own environment.
Discover the Application
First part of any new application monitoring is to determine what consists of the application. Application discovery has two common flaws. First is over-discovery, or creating so much detail association is complex and useless. Or the problem is under-discovery, in which you are missing key associations and thus useless. Discovery is like all other technology, it requires human guidance and oversight — do not blindly depend upon it.
Website Monitoring
For our working example, I will use a custom application using a traditional 3-tier architecture stack. We first start with the presentation layer. Its best to start by listing out what can go wrong. Network access might be down. Server failure is a possibility. The web server process (httpd) might no longer be running. Are the network storage directories mounted? Once you have your list, create your dashboard. Once you have your dashboard, link the necessary data to it (syslogs, traps, ping alarms). With a finished dashboard, you can automate it with policy. Create an alert that indicates an application error exists and points to the cause. If your assurance tool cannot perform these features, find one that does the job.
Database Monitoring
Now repeat the same for data layer. Which database do you have? MySQL provides rich monitoring plugins. What are the standard database KPIs? Google provides plenty of opportunity to leverage 3rd party lessons learned. What else is important with a database? Backup and redundancy are key. Are those working? Repeat the dashboard driven monitoring techniques from above. The result is 2/3rds of your custom application monitored.
The hard part…
The most difficult layer to deal with is the application layer. Here there are no rules. The best case is talking to the developers. Get them to explain and define the known KPIs and failure points. Worse case, you can break down the logs, processes, and ports in use to check for basic things. Do not discount basic monitoring such as this, the more your know the easier to troubleshoot. Run the dashboards you have as reports, get them into the inbox of the application team daily. This will assure the feedback you need to refine your monitoring policies.
Last advice…
– Be bold – Don’t be afraid of monitoring
– Communicate – Let the team see the results, if the data is wrong fix it
– If nobody cares about the data, you don’t have to keep it and don’t alert on it
– Alerts and notifications are only useful if they are rare and desired
My last point would be if you are a SMB, your managed service provider should be able to perform custom application monitoring. If the can’t, have them call me…
