As a Windows server administrator or Application Delivery Manager, you are presented with many monitoring options that function at various levels of your network architecture. You can monitor individual applications, Servers, Network Devices and so on. In most cases, this monitoring is done by either waiting for an agreed limit to be breached (for example, SLA-based monitoring) or for a monitored status to change (e.g. up/down). Ideally, monitoring is proactive and detects the discrete changes in your applications’ metrics that while not impactful yet, may be the precursor to a future application outage. Kemp 360 Vision can help you achieve this.
However, Kemp 360 Vision can also do a lot more. By its nature, the impact of any trend that could pose future application issues that may not be easily understood. The best monitoring software would alert you the trend and point you to the suspected root cause (such as increased memory usage) rather than alerting you to a symptom (application downtime) sometime later. It would also suggest the typical remedies making immediate action easy. Vision does this. It also does it in a timely manner, helping to ensure an ideal application experience with minimal downtime. All Vision Alerts are made up of Potential Impact, Context, a Checklist and Remediation Steps. Rather than merely indicating a problem and asking you to figure it out, it maps out the solution for you in manageable steps.
Consider this example. Everyone knows the importance of Active Directory in the modern network. It allows you to centrally manage domains and applications and is a vital piece of what makes your network work. Downtime here can destroy the application experience for connected applications. In this example, you, as the Application Delivery Manager, add domain authentication to a new application using Active Directory but map to a Group Policy that results in Recursive Lookups. You are not aware of any issues. However, the new authentication is using larger than expected amounts of memory. Without proactive monitoring, the first indication of this issue occurs when AD stops responding to authentication requests in time and users cannot connect. You must wait for the damage to occur before you can fix the problem. This is not the case for Vision customers. Proactive monitoring by Vision facilitates detection and correction of the issue before the server fails.
In this example, Kemp support informs you that they have noticed abnormally high memory usage for the Active Directory server during the morning. You receive a checklist from Kemp support asking you to check the server’s resources and to see if there is an increased load. A list of potentially affected applications is also included. The communication makes you aware that a failure to remedy the issue could result in a degraded application experience or even downtime. This helps you to realise that the new domain authentication service is utilizing this memory and you need to review your Active Directory server Group Policies to address the issue. You do so before the server fails, preventing any downtime and preserving the application experience of all your Active Directory users.
If you would like to start proactively resolving issues before they become critical, visit kemp.ax/kemp360/vision.