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Proactive Applications Monitoring

An important part of any successful business is to work proactively, no reactively. This is especially important when it comes to critical business systems, including accounting and payroll functions and e-commerce transactions. Applications monitoring is an important part of staying proactive when it comes to keeping a business both online and successful.

What is Applications Monitoring

Applications monitoring goes beyond providing data on how well an application is performing on a technical basis, so server administration staff can respond to issues as they arise, often before an site customer or user is aware of the issue. This is an incredibly important part of a system, especially for an e-commerce site.

Applications monitoring will often observe memory usage, hard drive utilization and throughput, to name a few. This information is compiled into metrics and reports for review by server administration to better understand site activity and performance highs and lows.

Why is Applications Monitoring Needed?

Applications monitoring is more than just simple data collection that provides insight as to how different applications are performing. This raw data can be used to complete high-level analysis of performance based on end-user site usage. This information can help identify what potential issues are on the horizon so they can be addressed before it becomes a serious issue for site customers, thus avoid lag times so they remain site customers.

By having the opportunity to review applications monitoring data on a continual basis, a clear plan with measurable objectives can be developed by server administration staff. If applications monitoring is not used, plans will be implemented without a solid understanding as to why server hiccups occur and how to avoid them in the future. This is obviously a much less effective, and risky, approach.

Why Analyzing Log Data Doesn't Work

Some server administrators may believe utilizing and reviewing standard server log data may be enough to keep sites online and e-commerce transactions running smoothly, however, that is often not the case. Prior to today's sophisticated applications monitoring options, log data was really the only option for attempting to determine the overall health of a system. However, due to today's high-level site architecture, server data logs may not collect all the relevant data the server administrator really needs to make sure they are taking the best approach to server responsiveness and site health. As a result, it makes much more sense to implement a complete applications monitoring system.