We had a requirement recently wherein a customer in North America wanted to compare the response times of their web applications from geographically different locations. They had their partners in Asia and Europe who cater to their back office processing. It was important that they ensure SLAs were met even from geographically distributed locations. They were able to achieve that.
Here is how Applications Manager worked for them.
1) Run an Enterprise Edition of Applications Manager with one Admin Server in North America, and one Managed Server in N.A, India and Netherlands respectively.
2) Create One URL Monitor per website /application to the same website in each of the Managed Servers.
3) In a day’s time, you will get sufficient response time info on how the website is performing from each location.
4) Go to Reports section in Admin Server and generate a response time report for the URL Monitors. Select the url monitors that you would like to compare and generate a comparison report. Voila you have a report for response times from the US, Europe and Asia.
Ofcourse there is no restriction on the number of Managed Servers, which means that will allow you to add ‘N’ number of locations.
How Applications Manager does it ?
Applications Manager has the capability to monitor simple HTTP(s) URL and URL Sequences / Applications along with a lot of other Applications and Servers. With support for a distributed architecture, you can have Applicatons Manager deployed in different data centers (read office locations) around the world and monitor your Website / web application. The central Admin Server will aggregate the data from the distributed data collectors (Managed Servers) over HTTPS. Now add to it the capability to group monitors and generate comparison reports.
Hope you can visualize a multiline graph with the response times of each of the URL monitors in each location, plotted against time. Checkout the screenshot below.
