You must be already aware of Release 9.2 of Applications Manager with VMWare Monitoring , Memcached Monitoring and PostgreSQL Monitoring .

Another silent enhancement we made in the previous release in addition to the popular anomaly detection and enhanced alarm management capabilities is the ability to take action on the search results.

We observed many of our customers with large number of monitors preferred to use the older search to reach the monitor. Now we decided to allow them to even take some action on the search results.

Now you can search for a keyword like "server" or "mysql" etc and you can take action on the results. The results show up with the Bulk Edit view that makes it easier to take action.




Some of the actions you can perform in bulk on the search results are updating display names, poll intervals, Manage/ UnManage, updating passwords, IP Address etc.

If there is something that you think will make life easy for you while using Applications Manager, do post your comments or vote your idea up, via our community portal.

Gibu

ManageEngine Applications Manager
Application Performance Monitoring Tool

We've just released version 9.2 of ManageEngine Applications Manager. This release includes new monitoring capabilities as well as other enhancements based on user demand.

Here's a quick look at what release 9.2 has to offer:

- Virtualization Monitoring:  We’re announcing out-of-the-box support for monitoring VMware ESX/ESXi host servers and their guest virtual machine instances. We provide deep dive application component monitoring, which helps you manage both physical and virtual components of a heterogeneous IT environment. You can find out which virtual machines are consuming your server resources and take action accordingly. With the help of end-user monitoring, you can also manage user experience before and after virtualization.

btw, this feature was previewed to a select audience at Best of Interop 2010 and was a finalist in the Virtualization category.

- PostgreSQL Monitoring to monitor the health and performance of your PostgreSQL database servers and ensure your PostgreSQL database servers are optimized for peak performance.

- Memcached monitoring to quickly detect and resolve problems with your caching systems.

- New REST APIs to create, edit, and delete downtime schedulers in Applications Manager. Plus, additional APIs to get monitor data, add monitors to Applications Manager, etc.

- Web application group which is a new type of monitor group. This will be useful for grouping your web infrastructure into logical components such as servers, databases, web servers, etc and better manage the relationship between components.

Other enhancements include an improved Real Browser Monitor dashboard, enhancements to Java Runtime Monitor, option to send events as SNMP traps to external SNMP listeners, etc. Read more.

That's it for now. Stay tuned to this space for detailed updates on each of these features.

When Applications Manager is your primary Applications and Systems Performance Monitoring tool, you need to make sure all supplementary views from 3rd party tools or intranet wikis are easily accessible to your operations team when they need it.

When ManageEngine Applications Manager Release 9.1 was out it had many enhancements for custom dashboards. One of which facilitates this.

Below is a screenshot that shows it all. Here we have shown how the "Embed Web Page" widget of "Custom Dashboards" in Applications Manager can integrate a web page from an external source. The example show cased is one that is based on our own Website Monitoring Service - www.site24x7.com.





If you observe QoS Worldwide Dashboard shows the status of zoho.com from a global point of presence by pulling data from www.site24x7.com which is a SaaS service. The data obtained from www.site24x7.com is shown right inside ManageEngine Applications Manager Web Client.

Well we have seen other interesting usages by some of our customers. For eg. one of our customers sent us a screenshot that showed how they integrated some views from ManageEngine NetflowAnalyzer !
 
Other possible uses are :
1) integrate a kbase article for a specific dashboard
2) integrate status of Help Desk tickets from your Ticketing system
3) integrate rack views/ pictures from the data center
4) Ofcourse nothing rocks than your imagination !

The "Bookmarks" widget and "Custom HTML and Text" widgets are useful variations of this embed webpage widget that gives the flexibility to provide useful contextual information in ManageEngine Applications Manager within the dashboard.

If there are other useful widgets you would like to see, do post your comments or vote your idea up, via our community portal.

BTW Release 9.2 is cooking and it should be out anytime this month. No prizes for guessing what's hottest - Virtualization Monitoring.

You might have come across Heat Charts for monitoring Website Traffic. A Heat Chart ( or Heat Map, as they are often called ) is a graphical representation of data where the values taken by a variable in a two-dimensional map are represented as colors.

We have extended the usage of Heat Charts to compare performance attributes of various monitors in Applications Manager. Heat Charts give more visibility into the performance of the server or the application, thereby it helps to decide whether there is a need for additional hardware to balance the load on the existing server or application.

Let us now look at how Heat Charts in Applications Manager help administrators.

Heat Charts are generated based on the performance values for various attributes. The colors in the Heat Chart is based on the Threshold Configuration for the attribute. Here is a screen shot of Heat Chart for CPU Utilization of servers within a cluster for the last 24 hours.



You can generate this chart for last 30 days and last 12 months. Here is another screen shot of Heat Chart for CPU Utilization for last 30 days.


 
A closer look at these heat charts show different colors – Gray, Green, Orange, Red. What do these colors indicate and how does Applications Manager arrive at these colors?


The next question anyone may have after looking at the colorful heat chart is ‘Can I change the colors?’. The answer is No.

But, how does Application Manager arrive at these colors? There are two ways by which you can arrive at the Heat Charts

Method 1:

The colors are identified based on the Threshold configured for the attribute. For example, CPU Utilization threshold is configured as follows :

• Critical Severity if the monitored value is >= 50 ( Red )
• Warning Severity if the monitored value is > 30 ( Orange )
• Clear Severity if the monitored value is <= 30 ( Green )
  

Here is a screenshot of the above configuration.



You can configure thresholds for all attributes through Admin -> Thresholds.

What if if you don’t configure the thresholds? Applications Manager calculates the average value of the attributes from all monitors and assigns a threshold value based on the average thus arrived. This average value is not stored in the database and it is used only for Heat Chart Reports. An example of one such attribute for which threshold is not configured is explained in Method 2 below.

Now, let us have a look at few more examples:

Heat Chart for Memory Utilization for last 24 hrs :


 
Heat Chart for Memory Utilization of servers within a cluster for last 30 days :



You can infer from this heat chart that most of the servers in this cluster have always been critical on the Memory Utilization attribute for the last 30 days. An action item upon this heat chart inference may be increasing the RAM size on each of these servers in the cluster or add additional server to this cluster to distribute the load.

Method 2 :

You can click the Edit option in the Heat Chart screen to edit the threshold value, so as to regenerate the page with new values. This is the most frequently used approach for Heat Charts.

A couple of examples from SQL Database monitor, for use by SQL administrators.

Heat chart for Cache hit ratio for last 24 hrs :



You may wonder that why this heat chart shows all variants of Green color. This is because the threshold is not configured for the Cache Hit Ratio attribute. The value ‘96’, as shown above, is an average value of Cache Hit Ratio of both the SQL database servers collected for the last 24 hrs.

Heat chart for SQL Recompilations per minute for last 30 days.



The above heat chart is generated after configuring thresholds for SQL Recompilations attribute on a SQL Database Monitor.

Now that we know how heat charts are generated, let us understand how they assist in strategic decisions on capacity planning and performance.

1. Heat charts provide a comparative snapshot of the performance attribute of a monitor in a given time period.
2. You can drill down to find out the time at which performance attribute of a monitor had gone critical i.e., violated the threshold rule. This helps to plan on additional hardware so as to combat the load during the peak hours, at which the performance goes critical. You may also work to distribute the load to other servers in the cluster by adding additional server to the cluster.
   
3. Heat charts provide an option to edit thresholds, based on which you can make a detailed comparative study of the attribute. This is widely useful when servers or applications are part of a cluster.
4. You can select the attribute for which the Heat Chart has to be generated, the attribute can selected from the right top corner of the heat chart. This reduces the effort in generating reports.

The reporting capability of Applications Manager is just not limited to Heat Charts. As you can see in the screen shots above, you can generate History Report, Statistical Reports and more.. I leave it to you to explore the reporting capabilities of Applications Manager.

Kevin

Server virtualization is one of the highest impact trends in the IT industry today with proven cost savings and other benefits. In spite of these benefits, virtualization brings its own share of complexities which can be quite overwhelming for the IT operations team. We, at ManageEngine Applications Manager, are looking to help IT teams across the world overcome these challenges by offering virtualization monitoring. We're just about to roll out out-of-the-box support for monitoring the availability and performance of VMware ESX/ESXi host servers and their guest virtual machine instances. This feature will be a part of release 9.2 expected to be out in the next few weeks.

While we were working on the VMware monitor, we got an opportunity to preview it to a select audience at the InterOp show in Las Vegas last week, and the response was very encouraging. In fact, Applications Manager was selected as one of the finalists in the Best of InterOp under Virtualization category. Although we did not win it, we definitely made a good impression on the judges. This is what Joe Hernick, one of the judges, had to say

“We also have to give a shout out to Manage Engine. While this version of Application Manager didn't bring home the gold in our virtualization competition, the company's initial foray into virtualization monitoring is on the right path at a price point that will raise a few eyebrows. Manage Engine has a solid track record of traditional systems management tools, offering 80% of the big dog's features at less than 20% of the cost with decent point-in-time reporting, client-side "record and playback" for application sessions, and broad support for existing hardware, operating systems, and apps. Now they are hooking into VMware APIs, for less than $2K to manage 25 servers. That gets our attention, and if you happen to be a small to medium size business operating in the dark troubleshooting application performance issues it’s worth taking a look. We hope Manage Engine sticks to their product road map, provide deeper and broader insight across virtualization vendors, and keeps bargain pricing as a core company value.”

If you are interested in knowing more about our virtualization monitoring offering, do take a look at the presentation below. This presentation is titled "ManageEngine Applications Manager - Beyond Virtualization Monitoring" and provides a high-level overview of our Virtualization monitoring capabilities. It also includes some screenshots of our VMware monitor screens. You don't have to provide your email id or any other information to get this presentation. If you have time, please do let us know your thoughts in your comments.

Get pdf version | Get pptx version

btw, release 9.2 is not just about virtualization monitoring, we have lots more in store for you. Stay tuned to this space for more info!

Note: Post edited for clarity