AVIcode Monitoring (for beginners)
Having taken a quick look at AVIcode yesterday, let’s take the gloves off and get a bit more hands on…
In this example we’ll be implementing AVIcode monitoring of a project management application ProLog. Sadly ProLog is something Orinoko developed themselves and the code quality leaves something to be desired. We have forced all staff to use this application for everything they do, so the Service Manager queue is building up!
In the Authoring Pane of the OpsMgr console I use the Add Monitoring Wizard to create a new Enterprise ASP.NET Application:
The wizard locates all the ASP apps on all of the servers I’m monitoring (this is an option in the AVIcode setup, if you wish you can limit discovery to certain machines).
The rest of this process is covered very well by Simon over on System Center Central here so I’ll skip on to what we get once it’s all up and running…
Each of our web pages gets its own dashboard under the Management Pack created for the .NET Application:
We also get a visual view of the application in a Distributed App:
I’m using the ProLog application to run a report of all the projects we’re working on currently.
I log in and select Reports – Overview
Nothing much happens, then eventually I receive a spurious error in Internet Explorer.
Over in OpsMgr I see data corresponding to this:
Behind the warning is significant data (still in the OpsMgr console):
You may notice that this is a Slowest Nodes alert showing that the page took 76672ms to render. 62626ms of this on the ReportExecution2005.asmx function. This is information I can then use to troubleshoot why this function of the application isn’t performing as it should.
Along with this data I get an excellent dashboard overview of application performance:
And if this isn’t enough, I can get deep into the code in the AVIcode Intercept Studio web console:
The top-level dashboard for each app collates relevant information for monitored processes. I can then drill into extraordinary detail around each transaction carried out against the application:
And drill deeper still into each individual event:
AVIcode is a massive product, with plenty of complexity and capability. Integrated with Operations Manager it provides the OpsMgr guys deep performance and alert knowledge on the performance of .NET applications and delivers even deeper intelligence for the .NET guys to optimise and troubleshoot poor performance and application failures all monitored in real-time. Great fun!
