Monitoring the health and performance of your network and applications is a critical part of your daily operations. However, it's not possible to do this monitoring manually, especially if you're a large organization running a complex network. An easier and more optimized solution is to use network monitoring platforms like ManageEngine Applications Manager. This is an enterprise-ready solution that can start monitoring your critical and non-critical applications effectively.
Read on to learn more about this tool, followed by a critical review of the same to help you understand if Applications Manager is the right tool for your organization.
What is the Applications Manager?
ManageEngine Applications Manager is an affordable monitoring solution that monitors a wide range of applications and devices. It can monitor web applications, servers, databases, mission-critical and custom applications, virtual resources, and more. Such a comprehensive platform provides the insights and visibility you need to better understand the health and performance of your resources. More importantly, it proactively identifies problems that you can fix before it impacts the wider organization.
Features of Applications Manager
Below are some of the important features of the Applications Manager.
Application Performance Monitoring
Applications Manager supports byte-code instrumentation for many programming languages and technologies. In essence, this translates to a detailed analysis of the code and the subsequent optimization suggestions for the same. Applications Manager supports this code-level analysis for apps built using the below languages and technologies.
- Java With Applications Manager, you can collect the transaction traces and trigger dump and garbage collection to better understand the performance of your Java applications.
- Node.js You can use Applications Manager to dissect every transaction and identify the problem code in applications that are built using node.js.
- PHP In PHP applications, you can use Applications Manager to gather the transaction details, collect error traces, and even identify the slow database calls that impact your application's performance.
- .NET You can analyze complex .NET code and transactions, from the front end to the database. Also, with Applications Manager, you can measure user experience and drill down to the issues quickly.
Besides these four prominent languages, you can also gain insights from JBoss, Ruby on Rails, Apache Geronimo, Tomcat, and more.
Infrastructure Monitoring
A highlight of Applications Manager is that it can monitor a wide range of infrastructure and devices. Here's a look at what you can gain from different device groups.
- Server Monitoring With Applications Manager, you can monitor the critical aspects of your server infrastructure, including CPU, memory, disk, and other hardware metrics.
- Converged Infrastructure Converged infrastructure is complex, to say the least. Still, the Applications Manager monitors the multiple layers of this infrastructure to provide maximum visibility into each layer.
- Containers Applications Manager provides in-depth insights into the health and working of containers and the applications they host. You can even get code-level insights for containerized applications.
- Databases When it comes to databases, the Applications Manager can track the slow queries and failures to pinpoint the root cause. Also, it can track many database KPIs.
- Application Servers Applications Manager makes it easy to identify and troubleshoot issues in your application servers before they impact your organization's operations.
- Big Data You can even monitor Hadoop and Spark instances with Applications Manager. In turn, this monitoring can help you to get the maximum performance from your NoSQL servers.
- Web Servers and Services Applications Manager provides the insights you need to monitor the performance of your web servers and services. In particular, it throws light into the caching layers of business applications to improve their performance.
- Middleware With Applications Manager, you can identify the deployment issues and infrastructure gaps in the middleware technologies.
Other than these services, this platform also monitors the mail and messaging servers and services like Active Directory, SNMP, DNS, and more.
Cloud Monitoring
As many organizations today have a presence in the cloud, it's no surprise that cloud monitoring is an essential feature of Applications Manager. It supports all the major players like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Office 365, OpenStack, and more. In all these services, the Applications Manager provides insights about usage, so you can make the most of available resources, and bring down the rate of un utilized and under-utilized resources. It also helps to identify performance issues, so you can fix them at the earliest.
Integrations
A noteworthy aspect of Applications Manager is its ability to integrate well with well-known platforms like Slack, ServiceNow, ServiceDesk Plus, and more. As it fits well in any infrastructure and workflow, the time and effort that goes into its integration are minimal.
In all, Applications Manager comes with a comprehensive set of features that covers every aspect of your infrastructure. Next, let's do a critical review to understand the impact of the Applications Manager on your organization.
A Critical Review of Applications Manager
Applications manager can be a versatile tool for large enterprises, especially ones that have a wide range of devices and applications. It works well for on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments as it comes with the necessary capabilities to monitor your devices and services across any environment. Also, it offers consistent results across development, QA, and production environments, so it helps to know where the gaps are present in each environment.
Other than this versatility, the Applications Manager can benefit your organization in the following ways.
In-depth Insights into Application Performance
Today, it's common for organizations to have multiple apps for different purposes. Many of them are custom-built, while others are bought from stores. Though there's nothing much you can do with third-party apps besides reporting bugs and new features, you have more control over the apps you build within your organization.
Regardless of the programming language, the Applications Manager can dive deep and critically analyze the code. Based on this analysis, it can show the code snippets that reduce performance. With such specific insights, you know which code modules you must redesign or re-code to improve the overall performance of your application.
Enhanced User Experience
Applications Manager helps to create a better experience for your end-users. It continuously tests the user paths of your critical web applications, so any problems can be discovered and fixed before end-users even notice them. Also, it finds the existing gaps in user experience through many synthetic testing mechanisms. Applications Manager supports Selenium-based scripts for testing the end-user experience, and you can test the scripts from real browsers and not just simulated ones. Moreover, you can test from different locations to see how varying Internet speeds can impact the end-user experience of your web applications. In case of any errors or breakages, you can always take screenshots with the Applications Manager, so the development team can better identify and fix the root cause of the problem.
Real-time Monitoring
Another key benefit of Applications Manager is that it monitors everything in real-time. This way, you can information about any failures or gaps as they happen, so you can quickly check the dependencies and fix them at the earliest.
In particular, the Applications Manager monitors the front-end performance in real-time and provides detailed information on the response times, web transactions, user sessions, JavaScript errors, and more. Such detailed information can quicken the troubleshooting process for you.
Dependency Mapping
One of the most important roadblocks that delay troubleshooting is the dependencies. Identifying the dependencies within a network and getting to the root cause can take considerable time and effort, depending on the nature of the problem at hand.
Applications Manager can ease this process for you. It automatically discovers devices, services, and applications that connect to your network and maps the dependency with other components in your network. Using this information, it creates a dependency map that shows, at a glance, the dependencies present for a particular component at any time. The highlight is that this dependency map changes dynamically as your environment changes, so what you see is the latest.
As a bonus, you can even auto-remediate by integration with CMDBs.
Smart Alerts
Applications Manager uses AI to identify the alerts that matter the most and sends them to the relevant stakeholders. As a result, there's no alert overload and your employees won't feel overwhelmed either. More importantly, you can control the nature and frequency of alerts. For example, you can set static and dynamic thresholds to different metrics, and the Applications Manager will send notifications when there are deviations from these thresholds. These alerts also help with proactive anomaly detection and quick remediation.
Also, you can configure to send alerts through email, SMS< or Slack, and can even integrate them with ITSM tools like ServiceNow and ServiceDesk Plus. Sometimes, you can even automate actions for self-remediation.
Detailed Analytics
Another important benefit of an Applications Manager is the insightful and relevant analytics it offers for your organization. You have the option to gather all the analytics it offers and create a graph or report out of them, so you can better visualize and understand the problem on hand. You even have the option to create custom dashboards and share them with your stakeholders.
Also, Applications Manager helps with creating reports using its 500+ pre-built reporting templates. No additional coding or technical knowledge is required for creating these reports and dashboards.
Improves DevOps Processes
Applications Manager is a handy tool for all DevOps teams as it helps them to correlate code changes with application performance. Furthermore, it provides the insights your DevOps teams need to achieve the performance goals of different applications. The information generated by the Applications Manager can also help to streamline DevOps workflows and processes.
Optimizes Application Profitability
As a product owner, your aim is always to enhance the profits earned by your application. With Applications Manager, you can understand the customers' journey through your applications, their pain points, the impact of your application's performance, and the revenue it brings to your organization. Armed with this information, you can make decisions that will boost your profits.
Enables Quicker Troubleshooting
Applications Manager provides the information you need to quickly and efficiently troubleshoot issues as they come up. Many times, this platform provides information in real-time, so you can quickly dig through the information to identify the root cause.
Bridges IT and Business
One of the biggest reasons for the Applications Manager's popularity is its role in bridging IT and business. Essentially, it monitors the performance of your applications and services to ensure that they align with the overall business objectives. In the process, it also helps to efficiently perform many critical functions such as budgeting, capacity planning, measuring and enhancing user experience, and more.
The above benefits clearly show that the Applications Manager can have a multi-pronged positive impact on your organization. With this platform, you can optimize the performance of your entire IT stack and can work towards achieving the high standards you set for yourself.
That said, Applications Manager is not without its downsides either. It doesn't have built-in SIEM capabilities, though it integrates well with other SIEM products. In some complex environments, extensive configuration and customization may entail time and effort.
Knowing the benefits and limitations can help you to better decide if Applications Manager is the right tool for your organization's needs.
Final Thoughts
In all, Applications Manager is a comprehensive and affordable monitoring solution that can monitor many kinds of devices, applications, services, and network environments. Its detailed insights coupled with the flexibility in configurations can make it a good choice for enterprises across all sectors. Plus, it provides a ton of benefits for your organization in the form of quick troubleshooting, enhanced profitability, and more.
It can also generate a wide range of reports, that, in turn, can be used for internal auditing and external compliance. As a bonus, it integrates well with many popular ITSM tools like ServiceNow, though it doesn't have built-in ITSM capabilities by itself.
Due to these reasons, the Applications Manager is often seen as a bridge that connects your IT operations with the overall business objectives. Needless to say, it can be a great addition to your IT environment. That said, make sure to evaluate your requirements and map them to the Applications Manager's capabilities before you decide. Start a 30-day free trial.
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