Monitoring application performance on the network

Analyzing the performance of networked applications is a common task for network administrators because every organization relies on these applications to conduct business operations. Too often, the root causes of poor application performance is misunderstood. And when the root cause is unknown or misdiagnosed, solutions typically involve expensive upgrades to increase and enhance network capacity.

The Exinda Appliance is designed to detect network problems, show them to you and help you uncover root causes, so you can take full advantage of the network hardware and capacity your have and only invest in more when it's truly required.

Exinda Appliances monitors and collects several properties of TCPTransmission Control Protocol flows of an application converts them to metrics. These metrics are compared to an established threshold and given a score between one and ten, known as the Application Performance Score (APSApplication Perfromance Score). The appliance also monitors single metric values within TCP flows for a specified application, known as Application Performance Metrics (APM).

This allows IT departments to use the Application Performance Score (APS) to determine what is performing well, and what is not. APS and APM have thresholds that identify acceptable performance levels for the applications. When the metric values cross the configured threshold, notifications are sent alerting the necessary users so they can review the issue and make the necessary modifications to allow the applications to perform within the threshold level.

Application Performance Score reports can be easily communicated to senior management and to users to help explain how the applications are performing. The reports can also be used to diagnose and determine where issues are in the network. For each APS score, the results for the metrics can identify the specific area within the network that is affecting the performance of the application, for instance server delays, network delays, or jitter. This makes it easier to fix any network issues and get the application back to optimum performance levels.

For more information refer to:

• Configure Application Performance Metric Objects
• Application Performance Score Reports
• How an Application Performance Score is calculated