Application and IT Infrastructure Performance Monitoring Using eG Enterprise Tool (Hands-on Review)

A Useful Hands-on Review of the ‘eG Enterprise Tool’ for Monitoring the Performance of Applications and IT Infrastructure for IT Teams:

The IT landscape has undergone significant changes in recent years, thanks to the emergence of new frameworks for application development and deployment.

We no longer rely on client-server applications running on physical machines.

Instead, we now have cloud-native and containerized applications based on micro-services technology, which dynamically allocate resources based on workload demands.

DevOps-driven organizations are striving for increased agility in deploying applications to meet their Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment schedules.

Read also => Application Performance Monitoring in DevOps

While these new trends bring their own benefits to businesses, it’s important to note that the architecture of applications is becoming more complex, heterogeneous, and distributed.

Monitoring, diagnosing, and optimizing application performance is no longer a simple task, and traditional methods of monitoring application uptime and server resource utilization are no longer sufficient.

Today, IT professionals are judged by the user experience of the applications they are responsible for.

When a user reports slow application access, IT teams must first confirm if there is indeed a user experience issue, and then diagnose the cause of the slowness, such as application code issues, backend database problems, SAN hotspots, network latency, etc.

To gain insight into user experience and perform root cause diagnostics, IT teams require end-to-end observability and monitoring intelligence.

Here is a hands-on review of eG Enterprise solution, which provides a converged approach to monitoring application and infrastructure performance.

Introduction

eG Enterprise is a web-based performance monitoring, diagnosis, and analytics solution designed for modern IT environments.

By using universal monitoring technology, eG Enterprise provides a unified view of application performance and the underlying environments (physical, virtual, cloud, container, etc.).

This solution serves as an early warning system, alerting administrators to performance problems when users experience slow page load times or high transaction wait times.

Various stakeholders in an IT organization can benefit from the converged application and infrastructure monitoring provided by eG Enterprise.

The main focus of this product is on IT operations staff and administrators. They can proactively identify problems, pinpoint root causes, and quickly resolve issues, ensuring a great user experience.

Helpdesk staff can also use the solution to quickly triage problems and involve the appropriate domain experts in troubleshooting. IT architects can gain insights into performance bottlenecks.

For capacity planners, eG Enterprise provides empirical data for intelligent planning. The solution offers application code-level visibility to developers, enabling them to optimize code for peak performance.

This product review provides an overview of the key features and functionalities of eG Enterprise APM solution and explains how it accelerates application performance monitoring and troubleshooting, benefiting IT teams.

End User Experience Monitoring

eG Enterprise utilizes two approaches to monitor user experience:

#1) Synthetic Monitoring

This approach simulates typical user sessions with an application. For example, a simulation may involve a user logging into an SAP application, checking inventory balance, updating records, and logging out.

The first step in synthetic monitoring is to record a sequence of application transactions as a script. This script is then periodically executed from different locations, providing insights into the user experience.

Synthetic monitoring is particularly useful for establishing consistent performance benchmarks for applications. It can also detect performance issues when there is no active traffic to an application (e.g., during late-night hours).

#2) Real User Monitoring (RUM)

Synthetic monitoring measures user experience only for the specified user sessions and locations where monitoring is configured.

However, application owners may still need to understand the experience of their entire user population. eG Enterprise offers Real User experience Monitoring (RUM) for this purpose.

eG Enterprise RUM is agentless and requires adding a JavaScript code, similar to the code used by Google Analytics for website tracking.

The JavaScript code snippet is added to application web pages, transparently to the application (e.g., via a load balancer or web server configuration).

When the web pages are accessed, the JavaScript code executes on the client browsers and reports performance metrics to the management server.

RUM monitors page load time, JavaScript errors, and the Apdex score, which measures the quality of user experience on a page. It provides insights into real user monitoring for web applications.

With RUM, application managers can easily identify the cause of slowness and pinpoint the issue for troubleshooting. It allows for a detailed breakdown of the page load time, including browser processing, network latency, server processing, and content download time.

Real user monitoring with eG Enterprise:

eG Enterprise RUM captures response time for all browser-based accesses to web applications. Reports and dashboards enable analysis of user experience and workload based on geography, web URLs, devices, etc.

Business Transaction Monitoring and Code-Level Visibility

When RUM indicates a server-side problem, further visibility into the application architecture is required to analyze transaction slowness.

eG Enterprise provides code-level insights into transaction performance using byte-code instrumentation. It traces the flow of application transactions across tiers, including application servers, message queues, third-party calls, and databases.

Using a tag-and-follow approach, eG Enterprise measures execution time at each tier, allowing for easy identification of bottlenecks in specific transactions or the overall application performance. A visual request processing transaction flow graph aids in identifying bottlenecks.

Visualization of transaction flow with eG Enterprise:

If an application server is causing slowness, there may be an issue in the application code. eG Enterprise offers application developers immediate insight into the specific line of code or method call that is causing slowness. It also identifies database queries impacting transaction performance.

The solution provides code-level transaction trace analysis for Java and .NET web applications, regardless of whether users access the applications from web or mobile devices.

Deep-Dive Performance Diagnostics

If there is no issue with application code but the application remains slow, the next step is to check the application server component (e.g., JBoss, Tomcat, WebLogic, IIS, etc.).

eG Enterprise offers out-of-the-box monitoring for all aspects of application server performance, including EJBs, servlets, JMS, JDBC connectivity, etc.

Memory sizing of the Java virtual machine (JVM) plays a crucial role in application performance. Incorrect JVM memory sizing can result in frequent garbage collections or out of memory exceptions.

eG Enterprise allows monitoring of the Java JVM and .NET CLR, capturing metrics that highlight issues such as runaway threads, deadlocks, memory leaks, etc.

In-depth Performance Analysis of the JVM:

Root Cause Diagnosis for Application Slowdown

Application slowness can also be attributed to underlying infrastructure issues such as network congestion, virtualization over-commitment, storage device failures, or under-provisioned cloud infrastructure.

Infrastructure bottlenecks affect transactions from multiple geographies and can result in slow database queries. It becomes necessary to extend monitoring beyond the application to gain comprehensive visibility.

eG Enterprise allows IT administrators to monitor every layer and tier of the supporting 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 correlates application performance with the underlying infrastructure and isolates the root cause. This is achieved by discovering inter-dependencies between tiers and mapping dependencies from application to application, application to VM, and VM to physical machine.

End-to-end Service topology and Root Cause Diagnosis:

By combining agentless and agent-based monitoring, eG Enterprise collects performance metrics from across the IT environment, including out-of-the-box and custom metrics, transaction traces, database queries, Windows events, Syslog messages, SNMP traps, resource usage metrics, user experience metrics, and configuration changes.

By providing unified monitoring and correlating application and infrastructure performance, eG Enterprise eliminates finger-pointing between teams and offers a single source of truth for problem diagnosis and triage.

In-Depth Historical Reports, Trends, and Analytics

Real-time monitoring is crucial, but historical analysis and reporting of performance are equally important.

eG Enterprise includes pre-built and customizable reports tailored to different stakeholders in an organization, such as operations staff, executives, architects, capacity planners, etc.

Domain-specific reports are designed for domain experts (e.g., system admins, VMware admins, database admins, Java developers, etc.) These reports can be viewed online, generated as PDFs, and configured for periodic email delivery.

IT teams can leverage the extensive reporting capabilities for performance troubleshooting, post-mortem analysis, compliance and auditing, capacity planning, infrastructure right-sizing, and management/executive reporting.

Built-in Analytics and Reports:

Conclusion

The eG Enterprise APM tool stands out for its comprehensive approach.

Its combination of deep application monitoring, broad infrastructure coverage, and embedded analytics make it an attractive choice for organizations looking to enhance the performance of their IT applications and infrastructure.

Learn more about eG Enterprise and get a free trial here.

If you try this APM tool and have any questions, please share your thoughts in the comments section below!