Applications Manager Blogs

We are glad to announce the release of Applications Manager 8.1 (Build no. 8100).

The major highlights of this release is the support for monitoring Sybase database servers.ManageEngine Applications Manager’s Sybase monitor enables the customers to monitor the availability,memory usage,connection statistics,database statistics, process and transaction details of the sybase database server.

The other features are

*Adding new monitor types: This feature allows to associate a monitor type to the inhouse scripts that might be used for monitoring your own applications

*MySQL monitoring: Added support for monitoring the Replication status and query statistics.

*Server monitoring: Added support for monitoring the Interface Traffic utilization in servers.

Existing customers - take the service pack route to update to the latest

http://manageengine.adventnet.com/products/applications_manager/service-packs.html

Download Full Build from
http://manageengine.adventnet.com/products/applications_manager/download.html

Further, we would like to have your feedback about how you use Applications Manager to monitor your servers and applications. An insight into your usage would help us take the product to the next level. We would love to add it to Customer Testimonials.

Thanks,

Arun kumar

Analyst reports state there are over 25% custom Applications out there and those apps do not have a standard way to monitor. Now here is a credible mechanism to monitor those custom applications too.

Where can you use it ?

1. Use it to track Unix SysLogs and check for :

* Kernel errors
* Device errors
* Security alerts etc

2. Check if an application is alive or dead because of say, an Out of Memory Error or some such problems.
3. Track changes in some critical summary files of business
4. Check if your back up had failed by checking the logs
5. Internal application teams can check out the contents of your build server to ensure everything had executed fine, if there was an copyright violation, compilation errors etc

Let me explain the different ways of monitoring Log Files in Applications Manager.

File System Monitor.

Using File System Monitor, you can monitor the Log File for its size, growth rate and alert when any contents specified by the user matches in that file.For example you can monitor the /var/log/message file and configure to alert when any of the contents “FATAL” or “ERROR” matches in that file.Whenever these words matches in that file, it will show the availability of the File System Monitor as down and RCA message will show these contents are matched in the Log File.

Note:
This will parse only the file contents added between the two polling intervals.Say for example when the Log File is parsed at 10:00 AM and in next polling at 10:05 AM, it will parse only the Last 5 minutes (between 10:00 AM and 10:05 AM) contents in the Log File and check whether the content matches.

Windows Event Log Monitoring.
Using the Windows Event Log monitoring, you can monitor whether any events occurred in the following windows logs.

* Application Logs
* System Logs
* Security Logs
* DNS Server Logs
* Directory Service
* File Replication Service

First step for monitoring the Event Logs is to create the rules in Applications Manager.Rules is nothing but, say for example i want to be notified when any events occurred in System Log with Error type.You can configure similar rules for different logs.For configuring these rules go to Admin–>Event Log Rules.

Second step is to enable in which servers you want to monitor the Event Logs.For this you can select the “Enable Event Log Monitoring” checkbox while adding a new windows server.When the windows server is already added, you can edit the monitor and enable the Event Log monitoring.

Now when any events occurred in the server, then the Health of the Server will become critical and the corresponding RCA message will give you the Events which are matched.Also you can see those Events in the bottom of the windows server page in Applications Manager.

Hope the above two features will help you to monitor the Log Files and System Events. Now before I wind up, let me also highlight our full blown Windows Event Log Monitoring Tool, ManageEngine EventLog Analyzer that will help you adhere to demands of regulatory compliance requirements like HIPAA, SOX, GLBA, and PCI etc..

Arun kumar

Our team is back after the the festival of lights ! This week let me tell you why you may get the sometimes annoying “Unknown category” servers. In applications manager when you add a new application or database for monitoring, the server in which that application is present will be also automatically added for monitoring. This server will be added under the Unknown category.

If SNMP agent is running in that remote server, applications manager will try to find the operating system of that server by querying that snmp agent ( it will query with community string as ‘public’ ). If applications manager gets proper response from the snmp agent, it will be added in the corresponding OS category and data collection will be initiated or that server will remain in Unknown category.

Applications manager will only check the availability of the servers under unknown category, it will not collect perform statistics ( like cpu utilization, disk utilization etc ). The user should manually edit and update the monitors with proper details under Unknown category to initiate full data collection. Similarly for other automatically discovered applications, if user has not provided proper credentials, applications manager will only check availability and response time for that application.

- Arun

Tomorrow, Diwali will arrive with a big bang..Quite literally! It is celebrated in India as festival of Lights. Lamps signify the removal of darkness in one’s lives, victory of good over evil.

May the light of happiness spread in our lives

Susan