Considerations for Application Performance Monitoring

 

Updated: May 13, 2016

Applies To: System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager, System Center 2012 - Operations Manager, System Center 2012 SP1 - Operations Manager

In Operations Manager, you can monitor Internet Information Services (IIS)-hosted .NET applications from server- and client-side perspectives to get details about application performance and reliability that can help you pinpoint root causes of incidents. For more information, see .NET Application Performance Monitoring Template in the Authoring Guide and Monitoring .NET Applications in the Operations Guide.

Operations Database

The primary consideration for application performance monitoring on design and planning is its impact on the database. Since application performance monitoring in Operations Manager is Health Service based, scale and load put on the Operations Manager Database is an important factor to consider.

For example, when monitoring many applications that generate several events (state changes) each per second, it is easy to see how the Health Services can be overloaded if not considered in the design phase. For example, the average application generates 0.3 events per second. With IIS supporting hundreds of applications per host it can result in 30 or more events being raised per second through the Health Service.

For more information see Operations Manager Sizing Helper and How to Configure Grooming Settings for the Operations Manager Database.

Agents

Application performance monitoring is not agentless, so using resource pools is not a design option for optimizing performance or scale. The application monitoring agent is installed at the same time as the Operations Manager agent. You do not have to pre-plan where to install the application monitoring service.

Upgrade

For AVIcode 5.7 customers, there are two ways to look at an upgrade:

  1. Integrated (AVIcode integrated with Operations Manager), where Operations Manager handles some of the configuration steps

  2. Standalone (Continuing to run AVIcode 5.7 as a separate product from Operations Manager)

For more information, see Notes for AVIcode 5.7 Customers in the Operations Guide.

Note: Installation of AVIcode 5.7 integration management packs is NOT supported in System Center 2012 – Operations Manager. If you need to use AVIcode 5.7 with System Center 2012 – Operations Manager, for example to monitor IIS 6 hosts, the management packs must be installed on the System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 environment before upgrading to System Center 2012 – Operations Manager. Additionally, you need to import an update for the AVIcode 5.7 management packs from the System Center 2012 – Operations Manager installation media.