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Understanding Applications Monitoring

Applications monitoring is an integral part of businesses staying both online and profitable. Depending on the type of business, a combination of different applications monitoring tools may be needed.

The Core Values of Applications Monitoring

Applications monitoring often falls into several different categories: fault, performance, configuration, security and accounting. Each type of applications monitoring systems provides different data to the information technology professionals charged with keeping servers online and websites performing properly and providing a secure e-commerce transaction to their site customers.

Fault: This type of monitoring is most often used to detect major errors, such as when a network or server goes down or a database goes offline. These are considered "catastrophic failures" that can seriously affect a business.

Performance: Performance monitoring focuses on the overall responsiveness of a server, website or database. While these errors may not completely take down a server or website, a slow response time can result in a negative site visitor experience and lost e-commerce sales.

Configuration: This type of monitoring is designed to ensure that the specific configuration settings of a website, server or database stay as they are. When a business has a complex server setup, mistakes can happen. Even worse, some can attempt to hack into a business for a variety of different reasons. Configuration monitoring helps to ensure those pre-set configurations do not change in error.

Security: As hacking becomes more prevalent, security monitoring helps to detect unauthorized attempts to access a system or server so information remains secure.

Accounting: When a business utilizes a centralized information technology division, they may charge back based on server usage. Accounting monitoring helps to track server usage so billing statements accurately reflect usage.

Each of these different types of applications monitoring respond to specific issues or needs, based on the type of business in need to monitoring. The implementation of the different applications monitoring will provide data that can be analyzed to ensure security is adequate and server and site speed is appropriately responsive. In many cases, multiple applications monitoring tools should be used in order to gain a complete view of the health and security of a server and website system.