Exposing Key Performance Metrics through Dashboards in Applications Manager (Part 1)

Applications Manager monitors over 50 applications and servers out-of-the-box and tracks a variety of performance indicators for each application or server monitored. In a typical IT environment however, there are certain servers and metrics that are more business critical than others. Therefore, IT administrators would want to provide more importance to those servers and their metrics. Dashboards are an easy way to put together such business-critical applications and view their performance and alerts at one place. In part 1 of this two-part series, we will take a closer look at the dashboards provided by Applications Manager.

Applications Manager provides 4 dashboards by default.

1. Default Dashboard

This is the dashboard that you’ll see as soon as you log in to the client and navigate to the ‘Home’ tab.

When an IT administrator or operator logs into a monitoring solution, there are certain metrics that he might want to see first up. The default dashboard consolidates those metrics from different systems in one place.

–  The Monitor Groups section shows the availability, health, status of the monitors in the group & availability for the day.
–  The Recent 10 alarms section shows the latest 10 alarms generated across all monitors.
–  The Infrastructure Snapshot section displays the status of the resources grouped based on the type of the monitor.

2. Business View

This is a flash-based view which provides a graphical representation of the different monitor groups, the monitors associated to those groups, along with their current status.

 You can create your own business view and publish them internally in your intranet without the need for any authentication. This view gives you a good idea of the dependencies between your applications and how they affect the availability and performance of each other.

3.  Availability


This view shows a bar-type chart of the availability status of your monitor groups. These metrics can be viewed for the last 24 hours or last 30 days.

4. Qos Worldwide:

This dashboard is done using the ’embed webpage’ widget. It provides the availability and performance metrics of your websites from outside your data center. The website monitoring is done by Site24x7 – our hosted website monitoring service, which has monitoring points at multiple geographical locations around the world. This dashboard actually integrates the performance data from Site24x7 into Applications Manager, so you can watch these metrics right inside your console.

Apart from the dashboards that are readily available, you can create your own custom dashboards and expose the data that is important to your business. We will be discussing more about custom dashboards in part 2 of this series, so stay tuned!