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Sentry-go®
3Ds (UK) Limited
© 2000-2010 |
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Monitoring Performance |
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Monitoring the performance of systems and the applications that run on them can
be extremely
useful in determining the health of your IT solutions. Many performance problems appear
as warnings long before users or systems are affected, giving you time to plan
and resolve them.
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Since Windows NT, performance information has been made available via
"performance counters". At first these can seem somewhat confusing but in effect they are provided
by both the system, and some applications running on it to show how that
particular device or software program is performing.
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For example, performance counters might show ...
- Current CPU usage
- The no. processes running on the system
- The length of a print queue
- The no. of active connections in a database
- The no. of clients connected to Microsoft Exchange
- ... and many more
Although often overlooked, these performance counters provide a wealth of information that show you
how the system is performing. By monitoring performance using these counters, you can
compare returned results ...
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- Against the designed maximum allowed - for example, what the system was
originally designed to handle
- Or against values or thresholds which, if constantly being hit might indicate
a failure or performance issue elsehwere.
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In many cases, monitoring performance counters manually & effectively is not
possible, especially if you have more than a couple of servers to look after or
other tasks to perform.
However, by keeping an eye on this information, you can be alerted to issues
long before they become problems for the end user, cuWith Sentry-go, monitoring the performance of both systems & applications
is both easy and simple to do,
allowing any performance counter installed on the local server can be checked
automatically.
You can,
for example ...
- Monitor that that a counter doesn't exceed or go below a given value
- Monitor performance over time, only alerting if the value is continually high
- Automaitcally reset cumulative counters, allowing totals to be used as part of
your monitoring
- Take automatic action if required
- Notify System Administrator(s) of errors or failures
With Sentry-go, you also have access to the Optimiser which in turn helps
you create base-line figures and perform trend analysis.
Examples where performance monitoring for both system & applications would be of benefit include ...
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- Any critical server
- Any critical application
- Any system which is designed for a given maximum throughput
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