Why Application Monitoring is Important to Network Performance

You've probably heard this before: users complaining about a slow network, or even worse, that it's not working at all. More often than ever, the applications that users need to have available to them everyday require quality network connectivity because many of them now reside on servers. While being able to monitor network performance is important, often times what is overlooked is application performance. This is becoming more evident as the software that we use moves into a distributed environment on servers in the hopes of better overall system performance.

Because of this, being able to keep track of applications and their ability to perform what is required of them is important. If you have ever had the experience of implementing a web-based application for users, you might know a bit about this subject. Unlike native applications, web based software requires performance on servers to be in tip-top shape and reliant on network connectivity. Although statistics like server utilization have been available in network performance monitoring, application performance metrics can go much deeper than your typical NPM.

With networks becoming ever more complex, it's probably better off that network and application performance is split off into separate silos of data management. Already in a typical NPM you are staring at flows, device statuses and packet loss statistics among other datastreams. Throw in server utilization to that mix and application statistics are probably best for another window entirely to keep information complete and manageable.

For in-house development, a developer can identify key statistics that application monitoring can alert for, and an IT analyst or networking professional can then configure the system to react appropriately. This could be via email alerts that can then alert on-call personnel to the problem depending on the severity of the application's processes. These alerts can be configured to monitor a diverse amount of information: storage utilization, file creation, Windows management errors and so on.

It's likely that out of the box software will require less configuration parameters; packages that come standard on Windows or Linux platforms have already long been a part of APM and don't need any configuration. Besides that, it's usually the in-house development that requires a watchful eye since the ones who are knowledgeable and support these applications are the analysts and development teams in an organization.

Using application performance management can save you a whole lot of drama if you choose to implement it. If you are a growing organization that is moving application platforms to the cloud and/or utilize a lot of customized development, it may be a resource you will want to turn to in order to support the needs of users.

About the Author : Daniel Cawrey

Daniel Cawrey is a freelance technology writer. Along with writing about network monitoring and corporate IT issues, he also maintains a blog about Google Chrome.