How to tackle commonly encountered issues in applications with web application monitoring

How to monitor web applications

Unless there’s been a huge breakthrough in technology that proves beneficial to employees, or something goes wrong that affects the business’ typical work processes, IT teams’ efforts often go unnoticed. Since significant breakthroughs are few and far between, more often than not, when someone’s contacting IT, it’s with a problem. Organizations usually implement a strong web application monitoring strategy to quickly resolve issues of this sort.

Why the seamless operation of web applications is so important

Web applications should be user-friendly and run smoothly. If users run into any issues, they’ll often switch to an alternative that performs better. To ensure end users are happy and web applications are functioning properly, it’s crucial to implement website monitoring and web server monitoring, in addition to your web application monitoring strategy.

Let’s examine some common web application issues and see how Applications Manager, ManageEngine’s web application performance monitoring solution, helps resolve them.

DNS and network connectivity issues

Given that the Domain Name System (DNS) handles at least 50 queries for a single webpage request and billions engaging in internet sessions, the DNS is easily the busiest server in most organizations. While accessing web applications, of the errors encountered, DNS errors are the most common. Without proper monitoring, IT departments can be bombarded with problems such as DNS latency, errors, and cache poisoning.

Applications Manager offers an End User Monitoring (EUM) feature to combat DNS issues. Real browser monitoring, which is a part of EUM, enables IT admins to record transactions and track metrics like connection time, network latency, and download time for every element of your webpage. EUM also enables IT admins to monitor the DNS, LDAP, mail server, and ping monitor from various geographical locations.

Slow loading times

Google experts consider any website that takes more than three seconds to render slow. Unoptimized images, JavaScript issues, third-party code in an app, such as a chat widget, and time-consuming code snippets can all cause slow responses in web applications.

Applications Manager’s powerful APM Insight scans your web applications and finds any components behind slow loading times, helping IT admins quickly find and respond to issues causing latency.

Database issues

Databases grow every day, and unless they’re optimized properly, this can result in overcrowding of data. Locking and contention, missing indexes, and inefficient queries are the most common reasons behind performance problems in databases. Slow SQL statements can also cause pages to load slowly. The way your databases interact with your application servers needs to be regularly monitored; failing to do so can negatively impact the performance of your web application.

Applications Manager notifies IT teams when there’s an overflow of information and the database is nearing its limit; so they can allocate resources efficiently and rightsize their servers.

Poorly written code

Besides inefficient algorithms and memory leaks, improper coding can lead to application deadlocks, latency, and overall performance degradation. Given that old versions of code often come with poor architecture, coders need to ensure that the code they recycle from old applications has the appropriate framework.

To overcome issues with old or poorly written code, the use of best coding practices and an automated tool that can review code is highly recommended. Applications Manager helps optimize code by providing you with a component-wise breakdown of response times for all web, database, and background transactions. Additionally, you can make sure that your clients are satisfied either by measuring APDEX scores or by using the synthetic transaction recorder—a component of the Real Browser Monitor (RBM)—that simulates the user’s journey through your application.

Traffic overload

Unexpected traffic spikes and poor load distribution slows the server down, resulting in slow response times or 504 errors (gateway timeouts). Applications Manager keeps traffic in check and helps you plan ahead by configuring thresholds and systematic alerts. 

Shared resources

In this internet-driven era, entire IT environments are built on the premise of shared resources. Some components are more important than others; for instance, a problem with ERP software is not as critical as a fault in the database server.

Since shared resources are interdependent, when one component is affected other servers in the vicinity are often impacted. Web application errors can be contagious, so you need to monitor servers and components diligently. Once you identify an infected application, quarantine it from the cluster to prevent it from affecting other components in the infrastructure.

These issues can affect your applications when you least expect them. IT teams need to always be ready for an attack or risk losing customers and revenue within a matter of minutes. Applications Manager is a powerful monitoring tool that keeps your IT team in the loop about any application issues while recognizing potential threats and shielding your websites from attacks. If you’d like to see Applications Manager in action, get started with a free, 30-day trial.