
Proactive Monitoring

It is important to have the right monitoring solution for an enterprise’s IT environment. More than that, it is imperative to leverage the right solution and deploy it for the appropriate requirements. In this context, the IT environment includes but is not limited to Applications, Servers, Services, End-User Devices, Network devices, APIs, Databases, etc. Towards that, let us understand the need and importance of Proactive Monitoring. This has a direct role in achieving the journey towards ZIF. Let us unravel the difference between reactive and proactive monitoring.
Reactive Monitoring – When a problem occurs in an IT environment, it gets notified through monitoring and the concerned team acts on it to resolve the issue.The problem could be as simple as slowness/poor performance, or as extreme as the unavailability of services like web site going down or server crashing leading to loss of business and revenue.
Proactive Monitoring – There are two levels of proactive monitoring,
Symptom-based proactive monitoring is a USP of the ZIF Monitor module. For example, take the case of CPU related monitoring. It is common to monitor the CPU utilization and act based on that. But Monitor doesn’t just focus on CPU utilization, there are a lot of underlying factors which causes the CPU utilization to go high. To name a few,
It is important to arrest these brewing factors at the right time, i.e., in the case of Processor Queue length, continuous or sustained queue of greater than 2 threads is generally an indication of congestion at processor level.Of course, in a multiple processor environment, we need to divide the queue length by the number of processors that are servicing the workload. As a remedy, the following can be done
1) the number of threads can be limited at the application level
2) unwanted processes can be killed to help close the queued items
3) upgrading the processor will help in keeping the queue length under control, which eventually will control the CPU utilization.
Above is a sample demonstration of finding the symptom and signal and arrest them proactively. ZIF’s Monitor not only monitors these symptoms, but also suggests the remedy through the recommendation from SMEs.
Synthetic monitoring (SM) is done by simulating the transactions through the tool without depending on the end-user to do the transactions. The advantages of synthetic monitoring are,
It works through 3 simple steps,
1) Record key transactions – Any number of transactions can be recorded, if required, all the functional flows can be recorded. An example of transaction in an e-commerce website could be, as simple as login and view the product catalogue, or,as elaborate as login, view product catalogue, move item to cart, check-out, make-payment and logout. For simulation purpose, dummy credit cards are used during payment gateway transactions.
2) Schedule the transactions – Whether it should run every 5 minutes or x hours or minutes.
3) Choose the location from which thesetransactions need to be triggered – The SM is available as on-premise or cloud options. Cloud SM provides the options to choose the SM engines available across globe (refer to the green dots in the figure below).
This is applicable mainly for web based applications, but can also be used for the underlying APIs as well.
SM solution has engines which run the recorded transactions against the target application. Once scheduled, the SM engine hosted either on-premise or remotely (refer to the green dots in the figure shown as sample representation), will run the recorded transactions at a predefined interval. The SM dashboard provides insights as detailed under the benefits section below.
As the SM does the synthetic transactions, it provides various insights like,
For more detailed information, or to request a demo please visit, https://zif.ai/
“Suresh heads the Monitor component of ZIF. He has 20 years of experience in Native Applications, Web, Cloud and Hybrid platforms from Engineering to Product Management. He has designed & hosted the monitoring solutions. He has been instrumental in conglomerating components to structure the Environment Performance Management suite of ZIF Monitor.“
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