A Comprehensive Review for IT Teams: Monitoring Application and IT Infrastructure Performance with the eG Enterprise Tool
The major shifts in the IT landscape in recent years due to the rise of innovative technologies for application creation and deployment have dramatically changed the way we operate.
Recommended IPTV Service Providers
- IPTVGREAT – Rating 4.8/5 ( 600+ Reviews )
- IPTVRESALE – Rating 5/5 ( 200+ Reviews )
- IPTVGANG – Rating 4.7/5 ( 1200+ Reviews )
- IPTVUNLOCK – Rating 5/5 ( 65 Reviews )
- IPTVFOLLOW -Rating 5/5 ( 48 Reviews )
- IPTVTOPS – Rating 5/5 ( 43 Reviews )
The days of being dependent on client-server apps operating on physical machines are behind us.
The current scenario includes cloud-native and containerized applications using microservices, which dynamically adjust resources depending on workload requirements.
Organizations led by DevOps aim to boost agility in deploying applications in line with their Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment agendas.
Also recommended => Monitoring Application Performance in DevOps
These emerging trends have business advantages, but it’s essential to recognize that the structure of applications is getting more layered, diverse and dispersed.
The task of monitoring, diagnosing, and enhancing application performance has grown more complex, making traditional methods for tracking application uptime and server resource utilization inadequate.
Nowadays, IT specialists are evaluated based on their ability to deliver an excellent user experience for the applications they manage.
When a user complains about slow application access, it’s crucial for IT teams to verify if there is indeed an issue with user experience. Diagnosing the source of the problem, such as issues with application coding, database problems, SAN hotspots or network delays, is also essential.
Gaining insight into user experiences and conducting root cause diagnostics requires IT teams to have end-to-end visibility and monitoring intelligence.
This is an in-depth review of the eG Enterprise solution, which delivers a unified approach to application and infrastructure performance monitoring.
You’ll Discover:
Introduction
eG Enterprise is a performance monitoring, diagnostics, and analytics platform designed for today’s IT infrastructures.
By employing universal monitoring capabilities, eG Enterprise allows IT teams to have a holistic view of application performance and the different environments these applications operate within – physical, virtual, cloud, container, and more.
This solution acts as an early alert system, warning administrators about performance problems when users experience slow page loading times or high transaction wait times.
Various IT stakeholders can leverage the unified application and infrastructure monitoring offered by eG Enterprise.
Primarily, this product targets IT operation staff and admins by enabling them to proactively detect, locate root causes and swiftly fix issues, leading to a top-tier user experience.
Support desks can utilize the solution to expedite problem management and engage domain experts in problem-solving. IT architectural teams can gather insights into performance bottlenecks.
Capacity planners can use eG Enterprise’s empirical data for smart planning. Developers can receive application code-level visibility, helping them optimize code performance.
This product review will provide an overview of the critical features of the eG Enterprise APM solution and demonstrates how innovative it is for application performance monitoring and troubleshooting.
Monitoring the End User Experience
Two techniques are employed by eG Enterprise for user experience monitoring:
#1) Synthetic Monitoring
This strategy mimics standard user interactions with an application. A simulation could include logging into an SAP application, checking the existing stock balance, updating records, and logging out.
The first stage in synthetic monitoring involves recording a sequence of application transactions into a script. This script is then routinely run from several locations, giving insights into the user’s experience.
Synthetic monitoring is especially useful for setting consistent performance yardsticks for applications and for identifying performance problems during periods of no active traffic (like during the night, for example).
#2) Real User Monitoring (RUM)
Synthetic monitoring can only measure the user’s experience for determined user sessions and locations where monitoring is in place.
However, application owners may still want to comprehend the experience of all their users. To address this need, eG Enterprise offers Real User Monitoring (RUM).
The RUM offered by eG Enterprise is agentless and simply requires adding a line of JavaScript code, similar to the code Google Analytics uses for website tracking.
This JavaScript code is added to the application’s web pages, without the application’s knowledge (e.g., via a load balancer or web server configuration). When users access the web pages, the JavaScript code runs on the users’ browser and relays performance metrics to the management server.
RUM monitors page load time, JavaScript faults, and the Apdex score which evaluates the quality of user experience. It offers insights into real user monitoring for web apps.
RUM aids application managers in recognizing the cause of slowdowns and in troubleshooting the issues. It provides a detailed division of the page load time, including browser processing, network delay, server processing and content download time.
Real User Monitoring with eG Enterprise:
eG Enterprise RUM documents the response time for all browser-based accesses to web applications. Reports and dashboards allow user experience and workload analysis based on geography, web URLs, devices, and more.
Business Transaction Monitoring and Code-Level Visibility
When RUM indicates a problem on the server-side, a more detailed view into the application architecture is required to examine transaction delays.
eG Enterprise gives a detailed view into transaction performance using byte-code instrumentation, tracking the path of application transactions across different layers, including application servers, message queues, third-party calls, and databases.
By employing a tag-and-follow methodology, eG Enterprise quantifies execution time at each layer. This allows for easy identification of specific transactions or overall application performance bottlenecks. To locate these bottlenecks, a visual request processing transaction flow map helps.
Transaction Flow Visualization with eG Enterprise:
If the application server is responsible for the slowdown, the application code may have a problem. eG Enterprise allows application developers to rapidly identify the specific line of code or method call causing the slow performance. It also detects database queries impacting transaction performance.
The solution offers analysis of code-level transaction trace for Java and .NET web applications, irrespective of whether the applications are accessed via web or mobile devices.
Deep-Dive into Performance Diagnostics
If the application code doesn’t pose a problem but the application continues to experience slowdowns, the next step is to scrutinize the application server component (e.g., JBoss, Tomcat, WebLogic, IIS, etc.).
eG Enterprise provides ready-to-use monitoring for all aspects of application server performance, such as EJBs, servlets, JMS, JDBC connectivity, etc.
Heaps’ memory sizing of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) plays a crucial role in application performance. Incorrect JVM memory sizing could lead to habitual garbage collections or memory shortage exceptions.
eG Enterprise monitors the Java JVM and .NET CLR, logging metrics that indicate problems like runaway threads, deadlocks, memory leaks, etc.
Deep Performance Analysis of JVM:
Root Cause Diagnosis of Application Slowdowns
Application slowdowns could also be caused by underlying infrastructure problems like network blockages, overcommitment in virtualization, failure of storage devices, or under-provisioned cloud infrastructure.
Infrastructure bottlenecks can impact transactions from different geographical locations and lead to sluggish database queries. It becomes critical, therefore, to extend monitoring beyond the application for comprehensive visibility.
eG Enterprise enables IT administrators to monitor every layer and every tier of the underlying infrastructure from the same console. This includes databases, servers, hypervisors, virtual machines, cloud platforms, containers, network devices, etc.
When an application is slow, eG Enterprise automatically associates application performance with the underlying infrastructure and pinpoints the root cause. This is achieved by discovering the interdependencies between the different tiers and mapping these dependencies from application to application, from application to VM, and from VM to physical machine.
End-to-End Service Topology and Root Cause Diagnosis:
eG Enterprise combines agentless and agent-based monitoring to collect performance metrics from the entire IT environment. This includes pre-built and custom metrics, traces of transactions, database queries, Windows events, Syslog messages, SNMP traps, usage data for resources, user experience metrics, and changes in configuration.
By offering unified monitoring and correlating application and infrastructure performance, eG Enterprise eradicates blame-shifting between teams and ensures there’s a single point of reference for troubleshooting and problem triage.
Detailed Historical Reports, Analyzing Trends, and Analytics
While real-time monitoring is crucial, performance reporting and historical analysis hold equal importance.
eG Enterprise comprises pre-designed and customizable reports tailored for different stakeholders within an organization, such as operation staff, executives, architects, planners, etc.
Reports designed for domain-specific experts like system admins, VMware admins, database admins, and Java developers allow insights into their domains. These reports can be viewed online, converted into PDF form and can be scheduled for periodic email delivery.
IT teams can leverage the robust reporting features for troubleshooting performance issues, postmortem analyses, compliance audits, capacity planning, right-sizing infrastructure, reporting to the management/executive team.
In-built Analytical Data and Reports:
Conclusion
The eG Enterprise APM tool excels due to its thorough and comprehensive approach.
Its mix of in-depth application monitoring, broad spectrum of infrastructure coverage, and built-in analytical capabilities make it a compelling option for businesses looking to improve the performance of their IT applications and supporting infrastructure.
Learn more about eG Enterprise and avail a free trial here.
Should you try this APM tool and have any queries, please feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section below!