With the release of Applications Manager 8.3, we have introduced quite a number of new features and upgrades. This includes the additional support for GlassFish and SilverStream servers. Now with fully added support for GlassFish server, you can monitor it out-of-the-box with Applications Manager.

GlassFish is an open source J2EE application server. Now with added support you can monitor, create alerts, schedule reports for this particular server. Some of the key metrics that can be monitored using Applications Manager are:

• Memory usage
• Thread Pool
• Web Applications

Applications Manager provides you detailed graph of Response Time for GlassFish server

Applications Manager provides you Memory Details for GlassFish server

Applications Manager provides you detailed graph for various threads in GlassFish server

You can create thresholds for these applications and create notifications and monitor them. You can also create custom reports based on the data available. Check out the post here for a detailed step-by-step procedure for monitoring GlassFish server. Here is a powerpoint presentation to help you use GlassFish monitor feature. In the next post we will talk about SilverStream server monitor.

w00t! We have now officially launched Applications Manager 8.3. This month has been exciting for all of us. First we saw the release of much awaited and anticipated Apple 3G iPhone, then we saw the release of world’s famous browser Mozilla Firefox 3.0 and now its our turn to release SMB’s favorite applications performance software Applications Manager 8.3. You can download the evaluation copy here or if you have already installed Applications Manager, you can upgrade by downloading this service pack here. Applications Manager 8.3 now comes with a lot more support for

• IBM WebSphere MQ,
• Silverstream,
• MS Office SharePoint and
• GlassFish Server.

We are now officially “Vista Capable” as well. We have also included support for Oracle 10.1.3 and enabled restricted access to monitor groups for managers. All this and much more in Appmanager 8.3!

Download it NOW!

Well today’s post is about ManageEngine PasswordManager Pro which is a related product from ManageEngine. This product helps manage application / server passwords. Below is a second person,- an IT admin’s account.

Well here is a graphic that tells it all

Hi,

I am Patrick. Your typical IT administrator. I am responsible for managing mission-critical business applications like app servers, databases, web services etc. in my network. And I use ManageEngine Applications Manager to monitor and manage them and ensure quality of service. With the growth of our application infrastructure by the day, my call of duty has gone beyond just managing the status of these applications. Can you take a quick guess what else? Well…It is not just about performance and availability anymore, but about managing passwords for these applications and securing them as well!

Now here are some of the challenges I face day to day. And as fellow IT administrators, I am sure you do too in your respective organizations. Admin passwords of applications are usually stored in plain text in files and are rarely changed, leaving them unprotected and posing a security threat. Even passwords that you store in Applications Manager to connect to the monitors for collecting management data , though secure, are rarely changed. How do I ensure that these passwords are shared efficiently and managed periodically, such that these ‘keys to my kingdom’ never land or remain in unsafe hands?

Sounds like a familiar problem in hand? Indeed it does. You see, balancing application monitoring and application password security is tough. But what keeps me up at night is the thought that one security breach as a result, is bad news for the company. If only I had a software that could help me manage my passwords with ease and secure my application infrastructure.

And then there was good news! I discovered ManageEngine PasswordManager Pro (PMP), which made all I wished for in managing my administrative passwords, now possible. PMP is secure and robust application that offers:

• a centralized repository for all your administrative passwords
• ways to securely provide and revoke access to these passwords and more…

Ofcourse if ManageEngine Applications Manager could also easily know these password changes, there is nothing like it. For now I can live with that. And with PasswordManager Pro my headaches are now fewer as I have all my password management needs covered!

Patrick

As always for ManageEngine products, you can checkout the online demo of ManageEngine PasswordManager Pro and checkout the website for more info .

Some of the major upgrades that we will be discussing in the next couple of posts:

• Availability and Health Reports - Critical and History Snapshots that have been added
• Outage Comparison Reports
• Availability Trend Reports
• Ability to configure and integrate business hours
• Network Interface Monitoring in WMI mode added
• Sybase Support added

There is going to be a couple more posts with some good screenshots with regards to these updates for your viewing. Some of major upgrades that were done in 8.2 were availability and health reports including critical snapshot, and history reports. Applications Manager generates reports that help you to analyze the performance of your Monitor Group. The reporting function enables you to analyze your servers/applications/services even across months and all this even without having to make any additional configuration changes. These reports depicts the availability, health, response time and alerts of the application over a specified period of time. In addition, critical and current snapshot are also provided to project a better understanding of the health and availability of applications.

Availability and Health reports of a banking application integrated with business hour

Outage comparison report integrated with business hour

Current snapshot report for the customer portal business service

Critical snapshot report for the customer portal business service

The current snapshot report provides you in-depth details such as monitor type, availability of that particular monitor including its health and most importantly a message column which indicates any information regarding the health and availability of the monitor in question. In Critical snapshot report, in addition to the above mentioned details “Monitor Group” details is also included.

Availability Trend report for Store application

More screenshots to follow…

You can integrate Applications Manager’s data in your intranet web page. We provide the Monitor Group and Monitor status in the form of JSON feeds (lightweight computer data interchange format, used as a simple alternative to using XML for asynchronously transmitting structured information between client and server).

To see the monitor group status, you can access this URL
<http://<AppManagerHostname>:<port>/jsonfeed.do?method=createMonitorGroupFeed>

To see the monitor status, you can access this URL

<http://<AppManagerHostname>:<port>/jsonfeed.do?method=createMonitorFeed>

For eg., a Sample file <jsonsample.html> that is used to parse the JSON data, is added to <AppManager_Home>/working/html directory.

Changes to be done in the <jsonsample.html>:

Change the hostname and port in the URL in first line in the sample file to suit your environment.

<script src=”http://< appmanagerhostname>:<port>/jsonfeed.do?method=createMonitorGroupFeed”>

If you want to view the monitor group status (Coming through JSON Feed), you can invoke URL -
http://<appmanagerhost>:<port>/html/ jsonsample.html

Susan

As organizations quickly embrace various technologies to improve their web applications, various web technologies are mashed to form a single/collage web application. Undoubtedly, the complexity of such an “integrated” application also increases exponentially. As these applications interact with in themselves and end users, they become extremely data intensive. Hence, the availability of data becomes extremely important. As it goes through several testing cycles, various scenarios are played out and the code is debugged before the application goes live. However, when the application goes live, end user scenarios prove to be completely different. Thus, there could be a distinct disconnect between the end user experience versus the use cases tested.

For example, lets us consider British Airways (BA) which lets the end user book tickets through critical live web applications. With worldwide customers, it becomes crucial for BA to be able track their web applications health and availability 24×7x365. Through global Point of Presence, such monitoring and alerting is carried out by finding out the response times of websites from different geographical locations. Several extraneous factors, fuzzy boundary conditions, quality of data input are also likely to affect the performance of the web application. These factors could negatively impact the performance of the web application and in extreme cases - may even derail the entire application. Such a derailment could affect BA’s revenues - which could range from a few thousands of dollars to millions/billions. In addition, the company’s image could also be adversely affected.

In mission-critical live web applications detecting the failure is only the half the work. Finding out the root cause of the failure becomes more important.

Figure 1: Scenario 1 – Without proper monitoring tools, failures go un-noticed

Figure 2: Scenario 2 – With proper monitoring tools, failures are monitored and informed as it happens

Methods such as URL monitoring and URL sequence monitors, which are actively practiced by ManageEngine Applications Manager, are used to detect such failures actively. These monitors provide live monitoring facilities, which enable the IT team to track web applications health and availability. Based on certain conditions and parameters, alerts are then issued to the IT team. By providing such active alerts, end user experience measurements help any organization to be able to track their web applications live and help them to maintain the performance of the application at optimal level.

Better end user experience = Better Revenues = Better Reputation = Loyal Customers

 

Many enterprises/organizations have started looking at these parameters as it becomes a part of the vital statistics of what the end user want/need. It also helps the IT team to detect any kind of failure occurring within the web application and thus avoiding failures in the future as well. Maintaining better end user experience measurement would lead to better retention rate of a company’s customer base. It also helps in acquiring new customer base and ultimately translates into better revenues and market share growth.

A bug in our backup script - Don’t worry, the fix would be out in our next Service Pack. But we a owe a big thanks to Brett Peterson, VisionShare, Inc. He not only pointed out to the bug but also suggested a way to fix it up.
————
The bin/BackupDB.sh script contains a bug that prevents it from running to completion at any time in the A.M. The SQL dump filename is generated using the following command:

export name=`date +%F_%k_%M_%S`

The %k causes a space in the resulting filename if the hour is not two digits in length (i.e., anytime in the A.M.). This causes the MysqlZip invocation later in the script to not find the .sql file and error out.

I patched this by changing the command above to use %H instead of %k:

export name=`date +%F_%H_%M_%S`

This causes a two-digit A.M. hour to have a zero in the first position and thus no spaces in the file name.

————

Susan

Many a thanks to Satya Dinesh Babu Manne, one of our customers who had found a new way to troubleshoot websphere problem. The solution [What he has basically tried was instead of trying to reuse any existing ports which seem to be having some conflicts, he has defined some new ports and transport chains] is given below:

1) In WebSphere Admin Console, Navigate to Application Servers -> Server Name -> Web Container Settings -> Web Container Transport Chains
2) In this view which shows current transport chains, click on New Button
3) In the resulting wizard at step 1, Give a new name to this chain (I gave it WC_CacheMonitor_Inbound) , and from the template Drop Down box select Webcontainer (Chain 1) and click on Next

4) In Step 2 , give this a new port name to identify it , and the host , port values, For the Port I gave 9030 when creating on instance 1 and 9032 when creating on instance 2. Click on Next.
5) In Step 3, Click on Finish button.
6) Repeat the above steps for each server in Cluster (I got 4 servers)
7) Save Configuration Changes.
Navigate to Environment -> Virtual Hosts, Click on New button
9) In the Wizard, give a new name and click on OK button.
10) In the resulting window click on the new Virtual Host created and click on Host Aliases for that Virtual Host.

11) Add the Virtual Host by making sure to reflect the Host and Port numbers (like 9030, 9032 etc) which have been already been created in the previous steps for Web Container Transport chains.
12) Save the Configuration Changes.
13) Navigate to Applications -> Enterprise Applications -> perfServletApp –> Map virtual hosts for Web modules
14) Select the newly created Virtual Host from the Drop Down.
15) Save the Configuration Changes, and restart all Servers.
16) The perfservlet is now accessible though ports 9030 and 9032 against the hosts configured

I was able to configure and test a websphere monitor after making these changes.

ManageEngine Applications Manager MySQL monitor helps you to monitor the availability and health of the MySQL servers.Recently we have added support for monitoring the replication status in mysql servers.

Monitored parameters:

Slave Staus - Checks whether the Slave is running or not.

Slave I\O Status - Checks whether the Slave I\O threads are running or not.

Slave SQL threads - Checks whether the Slave SQL threads are running or not.

Time behind the master - This indicates of “how” late the slave is behind the master.

Last Error - The last error occurred when Slave is synching the data from master.

You can configure notifications for the above monitored parameters.For example you can configure email notification when the Slave SQL threads are not running or the Slave is behind the Master above the configured time.

Thanks,

Arunkumar

It allows users to monitor applications and devices that are not supported out-of-the-box. With custom monitors, you can even associate in house scripts in a more standardized manner, plus write monitoring code in any programming language say Java, Jython, Ruby, .NET, Perl, PHP, Unix Shell Scripts, Windows Batch Files, VBS Scripts or in ‘C’ etc and integrate the monitoring stats into App Manager for Reporting, Alerting and Service Views etc.

Typical ScenarioOne customer had six Siebel applications running in six different machines. Currently, out of the box support for Siebel Application is not available, he uses the Script Monitoring feature of ManageEngine Applications Manager to monitor his applications. He has identical scripts running in the 6 machines and they produce the same output in the output file in the respective machines. Now he configures them as six Script Monitors. This gives him an opportunity to monitor his Siebel applications. Using Script Monitor facility, he monitors the following attributes

• transaction Router
• server request processor
• transaction processor

There are few disadvantages in his usage.

1. He has to give the same Output details while monitoring the Six siebel applications.
2. If he has to edit / add / delete the attributes , then he has to do so in all the six Script Monitors.
3. Further he would like to view them as specific six Siebel Monitors rather than six general Script Monitors.

Here comes the usage of New Monitor Type, that would avoid all the above inconveniences. You can now associate these scripts and model Siebel as one of the monitor types in Applications Manager.

1. Output Settings can be specified only once.
2. You could create any number of monitor instances for that particular type , just like any other in-built type say SAP / Weblogic / Oracle monitors in Applications Manager. While doing so, you just need to specify the Hostname and the corresponding Scripts
3. Adding / Deleting / Modifying attributes of some particular monitor type commonly will affect all the monitors of that monitor type.
4. Now you will be seeing six Siebel monitors rather than six Script Monitors.
5. Reports can be enabled for this type like any other type.

Have a look at how to demos - How to create Siebel Monitor type?

The same concept can be applied to any other application say for monitoring People Soft applications. You can have robust out of the box support for monitoring Forum Software, Custom Application Log Files on multiple servers etc. You can also build Business Intelligence Dashboards.

I believe, now you can realize the potential this feature offers

Susan