Application Performance Monitoring

Every organization has their own custom or standard application hosted on their network to serve various needs. These applications serve as a backbone of the business. These critical applications should be maintained and monitored such that it has Zero down Time. 

Assuring the Zero down time alone is not enough. The end user experience should also be considered. When accessing the application the end user should feel the faster response time and it should not be dumb. 

The end user experience of an application degrades of 2 reasons:

1.       Network Latency

2.       Application server issue. 

Let’s have a scenario to explain, a company has 3 sites (Site A, Site B and Site C). Site B is their data center and users from the Site A and Site C access their finance application hosted in the site B data center.  The finance application is web based and has DB2 server as the back-end. 

Users in Site A and C reports that application is very slow and the data are getting dropped. A Administrator has been assigned a task to check what exactly going wrong in regards to this application. 

Application performance can be determined by measuring the Network traffic, latency and Application server hardware utilization. 

While analyzing the Network bottleneck, it is been observed QoS policies are placed on both Site A and Site C routers to shape this business critical application traffic. 

  Router(config)#ip nbar custom DB2 tcp 1433
    Traffic Class Creation :-
    Router(config)# class-map database
    Router(config-cmap)# match protocol DB
    Policy Creation :-
    Router(config)# policy-map DB2
    Router(config-pmap)# class DB2
    Router(config-pmap-c)# bandwidth percent 75 

Using ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer tool, administrator verifies that DB2 traffic to Site B data center is being  properly utilized and using the Cisco IP SLA WAN RTT, he verifies that there is no latency, packet loss and Round trip time is also well under threshold. He also verifies the performance of QoS policy applied for DB2 through Cisco CBQoS reporting.

The analysis done by the administrator gives an idea that the problem is not with network connectivity.

The next step is to analyze the performance of database server, he was using ManageEngine Application manager to analyze this performance of the database server. He created monitor to measure the hardware components like CPU, RAM, HDD etc and also a monitor for DB2 which checks the health and number of concurrent queries, connections and errors on the database server.

He finds that RAM on the server is highly utilized and the connection time is also high.

So the Administrator decides to increase the RAM on the server to improve the performance.

Further Administrator added alerting profile in both ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer and Application manager, if there is any latency or high traffic utilization on WAN links, the NetFlow Analyzer generate alerts and Application manager generate alert if the database server has any problem. 

With very good network monitoring and alerting tool administrator around the globe can ensure Zero down time and good ART.

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Determine the Performance of your Network through Cisco IP SLA

Growing business needs and to avoid time taken for arranging business meet, many companies and organization deploy facilities like Video Conferencing. Apart from this there are also other application like IPTV(Television over internet protocol) which could put load on the network. 

Video packets (RTP) significantly impact network performance owing to their heavy nature and high flow rates. So before deploying video traffic on the network, the network should be assessed for performance as to how much will it impact the network?

Administrator responsibility is to check the health and performance of network before implementation. It has to be ensured that network is really capable enough to handle this kind of video traffic.

Cisco IP SLA :

Cisco IP SLA is a feature included in the Cisco IOS Software that gives administrators the ability to analyze service levels for IP applications and services. IP SLA uses active traffic-monitoring technology to monitor continuous traffic on the network. This is a reliable method in measuring overhead network performance. Cisco Routers provide IP SLA Responders that give accuracy of measured data across a network.

Cisco IPSLA helps to achieve following on the network:

• Application and Network performance analysis on the network.
• Reduce time and costs spend troubleshooting network performance issue.
• Continuous monitoring of network health
• Assessing Network capability before deploying network application or technology.

Cisco IPSLA VoIP and WAN RTT helps to analyze performance VoIP and data links on a network. Now the Cisco IPSLA VO helps you to identify performance of network when it has video traffic.

Cisco IP SLA VO:

IP SLA Video Operation (VO) is a new type of IP SLA technology that generates video traffic with the same traffic characteristics as a real video and measures the performance of link carrying this kind of video traffic.

IP SLA VO is similar to other IP SLA technology. It has a sender (source) to generate synthetic traffic, and a responder (destination) to absorb and analyze these packets.

IP SLA VO has following advantages:

• We can analyze the network health before deploying Video Application
• Troubleshooting performance of application end to end and per hop.
• Understanding Video traffic pattern on the network and helps to capacity planning.

Cisco IP SLA VO operations provides various application profiles that enables administrator to check capability of the network before implementing them. The available profiles are Cisco Telepresence, IPTV, Webex and IPVSC etc. 

 

Cisco IP SLA – Video Operations(IP SLA VO) acts as a stress tester on the network. One can validate the effect of rich media applications on the performance of other applications on the network. This helps a great way in ensuring that the network can handle video traffic smoothly and effectively.

Cisco IP SLA reports look like the one below:

Reference :-

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios-xml/ios/ipsla/configuration/12-2se/sla_video.html#GUID-B0ED7EBB-452D-4DCD-90BF-43E71FEEDAA9

Join us on twitter @NetFlow-geek

Reach us on Facebook at NetFlow Analyzer TAC

Catch up with the latest updates in the industry, through our LinkedIn community Bandwidth Monitoring and Traffic Analysis for Enterprises

Praveen Kumar

NetFlow Analyzer Technical Team