Welcome to Application-Centric Server Monitoring

Application-centric and business transaction-focused. These two qualities are the heart of what sets AppDynamics Server Monitoring apart from other server monitoring tools, and make it such an essential component of a unified monitoring solution.

“Application-centric” in that it takes a top-down approach. Typical legacy approaches employ a bottom-up strategy, meaning that they look at and alert on individual infrastructure components — but if there is an alert, there’s usually no indication if or how the issue is actually impacting application performance and the user experience. Server Monitoring looks at what’s happening in the application itself, and if there is an issue, quickly pinpoints root cause wherever it is in the infrastructure. It’s a quicker, more efficient way to make sure users are having an ideal experience, and to resolve issues more quickly if they are not.

“Business transaction-focused” in that it follows a transaction, whether it’s search, checkout, form-filling, link click-throughs — whatever the business needs to follow, however it needs to follow it — throughout the application environment, wherever that transaction travels. So as the transaction traverses within and across servers, Server Monitoring traces and follows it, watching the entire time for anything that could compromise successful completion of the transaction and therefore impact the business. It illuminates the real consequences to the business of performance issues and outages.

In short, because it is application-centric and business transaction-focused, Server Monitoring helps to ensure not only that server infrastructure is functioning properly, but that users are having a successful experience and business outcomes are being optimized.

Server Monitoring, an essential component of AppDynamics Unified Monitoring, alongside end-user, application, and database monitoring, is now available for beta. It is fully integrated into the AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform, and provides the data needed to quickly identify and resolve application performance issues.

AppDynamics Server Monitoring solution provides extensive host visibility, extended CPU, network and storage performance metrics, and detailed process list information.

The Server Monitoring dashboard provides comprehensive summary of all server resources – CPU, memory, storage and networking. In addition, the dashboard also provides details about  top ten processes consuming CPUs and Memory on Dashboard.

Detailed storage and network pages provide additional details required for troubleshooting application performance issues that are potentially caused due to storage or networking issues. Storage ( Volumes ) page shows detailed information on disk usage, I/O utilization, I/O rate, I/O wait time and I/O operations per minute for each attached physical disks or shared storage. Similarly Networks page provides overall health, sent/received network throughput and incoming/outgoing packets per sec. for each network card.

AppDynamics Server Monitoring solution provides complete visibility into all the processes running on the server. It provides detailed information on all the processes running on the server. For example, process count, thread count, start time, end time, CPU usage, CPU trend, memory usage, memory trend, command line info, user, user group, process ID, etc.

Customers can also set-up health rules and policies to automate actions to resolve the performance issues. Health rules are created using the health rule wizard.

Health rules establish the health status of an entity by defining levels of performance based on metrics; for example, CPU utilization (for a server) is too high.When the performance of an entity affected by the rule violates rule’s conditions, a health rule violation exists.

Policies provide a mechanism for automating monitoring and problem remediation. You can proactively define the events that are of greatest concern for keeping your applications running smoothly and then create policies that specify actions to start automatically when those events occur.

An action is a predefined, reusable, automated response to an event. You can use actions to automate your runbooks. A policy can trigger an action in response to any event. You configure which actions are triggered by which events when you configure policies.

Server Monitoring offers a host of capabilities that make it indispensable, including application-server performance correlation, dynamic baselining, scalability analyses, and an intuitive UI that makes it easy even for non-infrastructure experts to drill down and solve application issues. It’s easy to deploy on-premises, in the cloud, or as a hybrid, requires zero configuration, can be up and running in minutes, and consumes less than two percent overhead.

Find a full list of Server Monitoring features and sign up for beta here.

Servers and their affiliated infrastructure — including VMs, mainframes, containers such as Docker, load balancers, etc. — are a critical link in the end-to-end journey that applications and their associated transactions take to power successful user interaction. If you don’t have insight into servers and and the applications and transactions they support, you don’t have a complete monitoring solution and are putting user experience at risk. With Server Monitoring as part of AppDynamics Unified Monitoring, you gain confidence that there are no blind spots in your end-to-end picture of application performance.