Monitor Your Servers around the World with ManageEngine Applications Manager

By : Dinesh Asanka Jan 25, 2006

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In today's fiercely competitive business environment, 24/7 system availability has become necessary, not just an added advantage. To achieve this target you need to monitor your web applications, application servers, web servers, database servers, mail servers, and other related services continuously. Nowadays your servers may be located over several geographical areas. Because of this, day-to-day management is not always rosy for database or system administrators. AdventNet has a solution for monitoring your servers and services: the ManageEngine Applications Manager.

Installation

ManageEngine Applications Manager comes with a vibrant installation that will provide you with information about the product. It is also one of the few products that supports multiple languages — English, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese. This review was carried out on the English language version.

Product Overview

Applications Manager comes with a web interface from which it can be configured and reports created.

The product allows you to monitor all your servers and services from one location, including application servers, transaction monitors, database servers, mail servers, and web services. This review will focus on Microsoft SQL Server.

As a DBA your primary task is to monitor all database servers. The more servers you have, and the more locations at which they are housed, the more difficult will be your job.

The integration of Google Maps with Applications Manager enables you to represent visually, the status of all your monitor groups across the globe. The Google Maps API embeds Google Maps in web pages with JavaScript. The root cause analysis (RCA) data for configured monitor groups is available in the map.

In order to integrate Google Maps, you need to register for a Google Map key: www.google.com/apis/maps/.

When you log into the system, you will see the overall picture of your database servers. Standard colors (green and red) let you identify the status of your server at a glance. Clicking the server icon will give you a detailed view.

When it comes to SQL Server, a DBA looks at many parameters. To measure these parameters, normal practice is to run the Performance Monitor utility. As it is not tailor made for SQL Server, there are some issues associated with it. The main issue is that it does not have an energetic alerting system.

In Applications Manager there are six types of monitoring parameters: Database PagesConnection Statistics, Cache Details, Latch Details, Access Methods Details, Lock Details, and SQL Statistics. Let us see how a DBA can use these values to improve performance in SQL Server. For each parameter, you can define a threshold. You can define an alert based on that threshold.