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Synthetic Monitoring

Synthetic Monitoring is referred to as an approach of testing a web service or a website by simulating the website visitors’ requests across various geographies in order to test its availability and performance. One can compare performance stats of different geographies and formulate performance improvement plans. Synthetic monitoring lets you find problems before your customers do leading to shorter MTTR. One can be prepared for diverse user scenarios by testing the websites and applications from the end users perspective.

Advantages of Synthetic Monitoring:

With synthetic monitoring: Operations teams are able to find and fix issues before they impact the end users, monitor business processes and complex transactions, Measure and Adhere to SLAs, baselining and benchmarking, test from the end users’ perspective, prepare for a new market or peak traffic etc.

Two types of Synthetic Monitoring include Active (conducting the tests on schedule) & Passive monitoring (requires user action to initiate the test). There are chances of an issue going unnoticed with passive monitoring e.g. during less traffic hours. For this reason, active approach to synthetic monitoring is considered to be an efficient monitoring approach against outages and slowdowns.

SYNTHETIC MONITORING WITH APPLICARE

Applicare offers four types of synthetic monitoring:

    • HTTP Monitor
    • JMeter Script
    • Script Monitor
    • Screen Scraping Automation

With Synthetic User Experience Analyzer, you can view the performance stats for your configured monitors in real time, graphical and historical views. Double-clicking on an entry in any view or a data point in charts will bring up the BTM trace view or the detailed JMeter script result view if the monitor is a JMeter script.

User Experience

Jmeter Script Execution Details

HTTP Monitor Error Snapshot

Execution Details

Trace details

For further reading on Synthetic Monitoring with Applicare, go to: https://helpdesk.arcturustech.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360043235972-Synthetic-Transactions

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Apache Monitoring with Applicare

Because of its customizable modular architecture catering to a multitude of needs, Apache is a widely used cross-platform web server. Although it has highly stable nature, yet, performance bottlenecks in Apache web server lead to slowness in the web pages. Inability to see the number of web server requests and traffic spikes to the website makes server capacity management difficult. Poor performance of the associated IT infrastructure—operating system, database, virtual machines, hardware, etc.—causes website downtime. Hence, it is important to implement a robust Apache web server monitoring system in order to identify potential problems before they turn into something big.

With Applicare’s Apache Web Server monitoring agent, one can monitor Apache Web Server in real-time, and diagnose performance bottlenecks while running in a live production or development environment. Applicare’s Apache agent monitors the below performance monitoring metrics:

Idle Threads: It is the total number of idle workers/idle processes waiting for an HTTP request. If there are very few or no idle processes, that means the server is using up all the processes and the new requests have to be on hold until the older requests are completed.

Busy Threads show the total number of processes actively processing an HTTP request.

Bytes per Request: This metric gives the average number of bytes being transferred per HTTP request.

Bytes per Second records the total amount of data the web server is transferring per second.

Throughput records the total number of HTTP requests the web server is processing per minute.

The Server Analyzer module of the agent monitors other aspects of the OS such as CPU%, Process, Physical free memory, system load, swap memory usage, TCP Connections etc.

Apache User Experience Analyzer dashboard gives details of types of transactions, number of transactions coming in, number of errors in those transactions, load at any point of time and average response time. Alerts can be generated on transaction failures & SLA violations.

Individual transaction details are available in the Transactions tab.

The module for monitoring Apache Web Server also supports the IBM HTTP Server.

Applicare Apache Monitoring Setup