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Understanding Application Performance Metrics

Keeping your Web applications running in a smooth and efficient manner requires the balance of various metrics. This delicate balance is essential to maintain, but many administrators and developers find sustaining this balancing act to be easier said than done. Because of this, application monitoring solutions were created. These tools offer streamlined monitoring of various performance metrics. In order for these solutions to be effective, you must first understand what metrics should be monitored and why. With this information, administrators are able to cultivate a comprehensive monitoring solution. When done properly, critical IT infrastructure elements sustain a level of constant and accurate communication and functionality.

Understanding Infrastructure Metric Systems

The use of metric monitoring is nothing new within the IT world. In order to truly understand the full operation of an application, one must gather detailed insights based upon specific metrics. By utilizing this form of monitoring, administrators are able to diagnose issues, fix errors and prevent future errors from occurring. Ultimately, these methods are designed to prevent information bottlenecks, which generally lead to critical errors, such as application downtime or transaction failures.

There are literally hundreds of metrics the average enterprise could choose to monitor. While this number can be daunting for many administrators, they are broken down into three primary categories. Each category features a unique set of metrics designed to monitor key elements that influence application performance and functionality. The three infrastructure metric system categories include:

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  • Application Metrics

    These metrics are isolated within the actual Web application. The function of these metric points is to isolate the performance of databases, Web servers and internal operations of an application. By monitoring these metrics, administrators give detailed insights into the actual operation of an application, such as database health and web server communications.

  • Hardware Metrics

    This category covers all metrics that are related to the physical, or hardware, components of an application. While the previous category covered digital communications and operations within the application, this category covers hardware, such as: disk usage, RAM (or physical memory space) and CPU functionality. These performances of these metrics are influenced by the operation of an application and other programs hosted within the same network. As the digital demands of an application change, hardware components must be altered to welcome these adaptations.

  • Operating System Metrics

    This category acts as the middleman between hardware and application metrics. In order for a digital application to communicate with its required hardware components, it must first travel through the operating system on a network. The operating system is comprised of components that facilitate the communication between essential metrics. Therefore, it’s essential that a monitoring solution continuously review the functionality and health of various OS metrics, such as: file systems, current processes, memory allocation and other various operations.