Visualize application dependencies

FAQ's

• Can we monitor the performance and availability of an application installed in a Windows Server? Yes, of course. Applications Manager can monitor applications running in Windows Server and collect all the metrics related to availability and performance.
• Is it possible to generate monthly reports for availability and performance of different servers? Once the monitors are discovered and configured in Applications Manager, you can pull the monthly trend reports for all metrics including availability and performance
• Can user logs be monitored using Applications Manager? Yes, Applications Manager enables file and log monitoring with the help of File/ Directory Monitor.
• Is it possible to monitor user login and user actions? Yes, with the Real Browser Monitoring (RBM) feature, you can monitor33É44 the same. You can read more about it here:
  https://www.manageengine.com/products/applications_manager/real-browser-monitoring.html
• What kind of performance details are collected for Dynamics AX? Class and query details including the performance of the underlying SQL server is tracked. You can read more here:
  https://www.manageengine.com/products/applications_manager/microsoft-dynamics-ax-monitoring.html
• Can application servers installed in IBM AIX OS be monitored? Yes, Applications Manager supports out-of-the-box monitoring for IBM AIX server and the apps installed on it as well.
• Is it possible to create overlapping Monitor Groups? For example, say, Asia, MEA, Oceanic server groups and then Finance, Asia and MEA. Can these kind of configurations be made with Monitor Groups? Absolutely. You can create Monitor Groups based on business service, geography or a combination of both. You can associate a particular monitor to more than one Monitor Group based on your requirement, and this should allow you to configure Monitor Groups the way you have described.
• How can I check the impact on my Applications Manager DB with respect to the metrics collected? Ideally, there should not be any significant impact in the APM DB based on the number of metrics collected provided you have sufficient disk space as per minimum system requirements.
• Is Applications Manager specifically designed to run on a server platform? It is designed to run on all Windows and Linux platforms. You can find the system requirements here:
  http://help.appmanager.com/system-requirements
• What is the recommended order to setup monitoring?33É44 We recommend to follow this order:33É44Monitors> Groups> Thresholds> Actions> Reporting.33É44 However, you are free to explore and use the setup that works best in your scenario.33É44
• If I enable another metric of any kind of monitor for reports, how much will that impact the size of the APM database? The disk space varies depending upon the number of monitors you have. You can read the system requirements here:
  http://help.appmanager.com/system-requirements33É44
• Can I monitor individual services on a machine? Yes. You can monitor services and processes running on the machine. You can see more here:33É44http://help.appmanager.com/windows
• What level of credentials are required to get database server metric? Does it work with SA or can it use an SQL username and password that has access to a particular database? You don't need an SA account. You can use an account with restricted privileges too. Refer this link which explains all the prerequisites required:33É44
  http://help.appmanager.com/applications-manager-prerequisites$mssql
• How can we monitor Oracle VM servers? Out of the box monitoring for Oracle VM is not available. We have it in our roadmap and will be releasing this feature before the end of this year. As of now, you can directly monitor the OS present in the VM using our Server monitor or use custom monitoring.
• In the Alarms tab, will it only show the health and 'down' alarms or will it also show attribute alarms based on the custom thresholds created? It will only show the Health and Availability alarms. To see further, you can view the Root Cause Analysis of the health.33É44
• If I want to monitor a Web server, do I need to configure the server in order to allow Application server monitoring? You can directly add the Microsoft web server (IIS). The server will automatically get added as Unknown. You can simply Unmanage it if you do not want to monitor it (unmanaged monitors will not be considered for the monitor count in your license).
• How many applications can we monitor with Applications Manager? You can monitor upto 250 applications with the professional edition. If you want to monitor more than 250 apps, we recommend the Enterprise Edition. This edition supports a distributed architecture and you can scale up to 10,000 applications with failover support as well.
• Is it possible to create a dashboard for monitor groups and their related alerts? Yes, you can. We have multiple widgets in Dashboards and you can create them as per your requirement. You can see more about it here:
  http://help.appmanager.com/custom-dashboards
• How can a Linux monitor be configured? It can be configured via Telnet, SSH or SNMP. You can see more here:33É44
  http://help.appmanager.com/linux
• What is the protocol used for discovering applications? Depends on the configured port and credentials you have enabled. For instance, for server we use SNMP, WMI, Telnet or SSH. For databases, it will be JDBC. For Java based apps, it will be JMX and so on.
• How is Linux server monitoring different in Applications Manager when compared to OpManager? In Applications Manager, the below additional metrics can be collected for your Linux servers:33É44Linux thread count, Linux swap memory utilization, Break up of CPU utilization - by CPU cores, Disk utilization - Total size (MB), Used (MB), Free (%), Free (MB), Disk I/O stats, Process details like CPU, Memory, Thread count, System load, etc.
• Is the dependency map created automatically? Yes, once you complete the discovery, Applications Manager will automatically create the dependency map using the current communication happening at the time.
• How can I see the availability and SLA reports? You can read about them in detail here:33É44
  http://help.appmanager.com/management-console
• How can I integrate Applications Manager with OpManager? There are two options to do this.
  You can install Applications Manager as a plug-in to OpManager in which Applications Manager will be shown as a frame inside OpManager. You can read about it here:33É44
  http://help.appmanager.com/applications-manager-plugin-build
  
  The second option is to use OpManager as a connector to Applications Manager. This option will be available in the upcoming release of Applications Manager. In this mode, OpManager devices can be imported into Applications Manager and they can be used within groups, to generate alerts, etc.
• If we add users through AD, what is the limit of licenses in context of users? It is limited by the number of users you have purchased in your product license.
• In a multi-user environment, can we see which user has created or modified or deleted monitor settings?33É44Where can we see logs to view user activities? We can check the Tomcat access logs in the product but detailed audit option is not available in at the moment. But we could take it up for development in future based on demand by multiple users.
• Can the business view/ dependency map be customised according to our requirement? Yes, you can use the settings option in the business views to customize it.
• How to configure background map on the dashboard View with groups from different locations? You can use the 'Topology map view' widget in dashboards to configure background map with monitors from different locations. We will be covering dashboards in detail in next session on Jan 31st 2018.
• Is the credential manager intended to use on the Admin server only in a distributed deployment? No, it can be used in both the Admin and Manged servers.
• Does the application discovery using the VMware option require VMware administrative credentials? One of my environments is hosted on a 'managed' VMware environment. No, guest privileges are sufficient except for certain administrative activities like start/stop/restart virtual machines.
• For domain users will it affect the number of license users? Yes, the number of users you can import from your AD is limited by your purchased licensed user count.
• We use Applications Manager Plugin in OpManager. Do we have limitations on monitoring things? There are no limitations in monitoring features. The user management will have to done through the OpManager console.
• Why do we have user group/ as we already selecting the role while creating user account? Creating a User group simplifies managing permissions and associations for multiple users at the same time. It will be useful for importing user groups through Active directory.
• Does the credential manager have to be configured on both Admin and Managed server or can it be trickled down? If you have an enterprise edition, doing it in Admin server is recommended.
• What is the best practice when it comes to using credential33É44manager on both Admin as well as Managed servers? Doing it in Admin is the recommended method. The credentials created in admin server will be synched to the managed servers automatically.
  
  Is that an option under the managed server tab? Admin server will do all the synchronisation automatically.
• how can we do root cause analysis to ascertain the problems? It will point you to the device and the attribute level information starting from the parent group to the lowest level. You can identify based on the Root cause analysis message given to you.
• Is Applications Manager agentless only for discovery? Applications Manager is agentless for both discovery as well as monitoring.
• What browser is the best supported for accessing Application Manager? All modern browsers are very well supported.Google Chrome is recommended.
• How can you be contacted to have the solution deployed in an establishment? You can contact eval-apm@manageengine.com to receive assistance regarding Applications Manager deployment in your establishment and for any other queries.
• How can someone configure alerts to come every 30 minutes? There are various alarm configuration options to configure. There are features like Alarm escalations that you can use. You can refer the user guide,33É44http://help.appmanager.com/admin-alarm-escalation .
• Is the discovery only based on network ports or other API are used for discovering applications like application specific APIs, wmi etc. We discover based on network ports.
• How do we know the port details of all the servers? We have already provided standard ports in port configuration. Hence, if there are any custom ports to be entered, you can provide it as well.
• What is the difference between monitor groups and business service? None. They are the same.
• Why do you need credentials just to scan for network port ? Do you use those ports to talk to the application APIs to monitor? Once we identify an application through the port we'll need the credential to connect and monitor it as an application from the Applications Manager. Most of the performance metrics might be protected by the application administrators. That is the reason we need credential to access the metrics.
• Can operator change the monitor group he has rights to? Limited access is granted, provided the Admin enables those privileges. Please refer the 'Permissions' tab within 'User Management' for more details.
• So the dependency mapping is done manually which means you have to know the relations to create a business view, right? There is no learning to query the application components to know the relations? We learn connections that we can capture using network commands. These connections will be mapped automatically by Applications Manager. The connections that are protected will have to be done manually by the user using Monitor Groups or selecting the necessary monitors in the select monitors option while using ADDM.
  
  Related to the dependency mapping, can I have an example of the relations of applications that are33É44automatically created? Applications Manger uses a Tomcat server and PostgreSQL database. They will be identified using a netstat command33É44comparison and will be automatically connected while doing the dependency mapping.
  
  This mean admin right for the server instance is needed, right? Yes, admin right is needed during discovery.
• When an application is discovered and all relations are created, will this automatically transform to a monitor group or do I have to create the group manually? Yes, once you save it as a business service it will get created as a Monitor group in Applications Manager.
• What if I would like to monitor Active Directory with APM? Will the ActiveDrectory be mapped with all the known components of ActiveDirectory infrastructure? Active Directory management is not available in Applications Manager. Only certain performance metrics of the AD Server are monitored. For detailed AD Management we have another product called ADManager Plus.
• As we use APM plugin with OpManager it seems there is a limitation in user management. It seems that we are limited to OpManager roles. Is it right? Will this be changed in next version of APM plugin? Both Applications Manager and OpManager have more or less similar roles. There shouldn't be anything to lose when you are using Applications Manager plugin. We will try to examine how to improve. However, immediate changes are unlikely.
• How can we monitor a SAN (EMC, NetApp, HP, IBM, etc, storage) We recommend you to try ManageEngine OpManager for storage devices monitoring.
• Dependencies with URLs (for example, the principal URL "www.google.com", with the children "www.google.com/hello"), if the children's down, how to configure the dependence for that so that the parent shows down too? Only with monitor groups or with Configure Alarm-Dependences? Suggest you to configure http url sequence monitor where you can record such a group of urls in the single transaction monitor. Once one of the child url monitor is down , the whole parent transaction monitor will be reported as down.