Flowmon and WhatsUp Gold: Discover application experience issues through single pane of glass
Let's take a look at how Progress products can help achieve this with a simple example. We have an internal application MyApp that is delivered through LoadMaster to achieve scalability, redundancy, high availability and another layer of protection. The application is hosted on a pair of servers, RealServer23 and RealServer24. This is a very common situation for enterprise-grade applications. The overall application topology is visualized in figure 1.
Let's start with the overall dashboard for MyApp in Whats Up Gold (figure 2). It connects IT infrastructure monitoring with Network Performance Monitoring & Diagnostics in a single view and gives insight at a glance. At first sight, we notice that server response time is degraded, overall application throughput is affected, and our RealServer24 shows CPU overload, which is correlated with server response time and throughput degradation on this server. The root cause is obvious, and our conclusion is made in a matter of seconds.
Now let's take some time to break down this dashboard and show how different charts highlight different aspects of the environment to allow us to isolate problems like this quickly. In the traffic overview of MyApp (figure 3), we can see individual components of the application from the network perspective, understand bandwidth utilization and summarize performance metrics such as server response time, round trip time or retransmissions.
In the traffic overview of VirtualService (figure 4), we understand bandwidth utilization and individual performance metrics as experienced by users.
Next, our concern is the status of individual components down the line. Monitoring of system resources on RealServer24 shows CPU overload (figure 5).
This CPU overload has a clear impact on user requests steered to RealServer24. Flowmon can further quantify this impact, and a consolidated picture is again available in Whats Up Gold next to the device utilization summary (figure 6).
We have demonstrated how integrated IT infrastructure monitoring and Network Performance Monitoring & Diagnostics can provide a consolidated view of all relevant metrics and telemetry to connect the dots and help to discover the root cause of application experience issues.
Here at Progress, we are on a mission to redefine Application eXperience and provide IT professionals with tools that will give them back control of the whole digital environment. The presented capability is based on the Whats Up Gold version 2022.0 that provides out of the box integration with Flowmon to gather and present volumetric and performance metrics as well as security events using Flowmon's native REST API and is available to all Whats Up Gold and Flowmon users. Flowmon version 11.1.x or 12.x is required. For security events Flowmon ADS version 11.4.x or 12.x is required.