Foglight for Application Operations 5.9.8

This User and Reference Guide provides an overview of Application Performance Monitoring (APM) with Foglight for Application Operations and Foglight APM for Real User Experience (hereafter called Foglight APM). It includes conceptual information to help you envision an APM installation with Foglight and overviews of the Service Operations Console (SOC) and other applicable dashboards that help you manage your unified APM installation.

This guide is intended for Application Performance Managers or Administrators who administer the overall design, implementation, and execution of the application performance monitoring strategy.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) refers to a set of capabilities or technologies that IT staff use to support the incident and problem management processes on multi-tier applications. A comprehensive APM implementation generally includes technology that provides the following capabilities:

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Real user experience monitoring

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Run-time application topology and execution path discovery, modeling, and display

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Transaction profiling across the technology stack

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Resource consumption and event monitoring within the discovered components

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Analytics

Foglight APM supports all of these capabilities, and provides information to the right users at the right time through a set of role-oriented operational dashboards.

Although there is no single organizational alignment or uniformly agreed upon set of titles for the actual practitioners of APM, the following role descriptions indicate the types of functions that typically interact with a Foglight APM installation:


	NOTE: Except for Foglight Administrator, the roles described here are not roles defined in Foglight.

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Foglight Administrator — responsible for configuring and managing Foglight, and for performing administrative tasks.

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Application Performance Manager — responsible for the design, implementation, and execution of the APM strategy.

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Application Support — responsible for ensuring that application services are performing as expected. Identifies and triages service degradations or outages.

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Platform Specialist or Administrator — responsible for the operation of an individual application component (for example, a database, a host, an application server, or a web server). Receives and responds to Foglight alarms on their platform or domain.

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Application Architect — a senior escalation resource who is typically engaged by Application Support for assistance in locating the source of an application issue.

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Application Developer — responsible for the application code. Uses the Foglight transactional performance dashboards to gain understanding of the operational execution and performance of their code.

For more information, see the following topics:

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Understanding the Foglight APM implementation

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Foglight requirements for APM workflows

Understanding the Foglight APM implementation

Foglight supports a modular approach to APM that allows customers to implement as many or as few pieces of the APM solution as required. This guide is intended as a comprehensive overview of an end-to-end APM installation strategy, and therefore includes cross-domain views.

Before you implement an APM strategy, it is important to perform proper requirement gathering, environment sizing, project planning, and scoping, just as you would with any other application. Our Professional Services team has developed a comprehensive strategy for APM implementation. You can review our process online at:
http://support.quest.com/professional-services-product-select/.

Foglight requirements for APM workflows

In order to make the best use of this document, ensure that your Foglight installation meets the following requirements before starting the workflows:

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Install and configure Foglight APM Appliances. For more information, see the Foglight APM Appliances Installation and Setup Guide.

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Install the Foglight Management Server and ensure that it is running. For more information, see the Foglight Installation and Setup Guide set.

Install and configure the cartridges required to monitor application components (for example, infrastructure, application servers, databases). For more information, see the documentation included with the cartridges you are using.

Configure end user transactions in Foglight Experience Monitor (FxM), Foglight Experience Viewer (FxV), and Foglight Transaction Recorder (FTR). For more information, see the documentation included with these products.

Build services, either through Dependency Mapping or manually, and add the services to the SOC. For more information, see Understanding recommended service structures, and the topic “Creating and maintaining services” in the Managing Dependency Mapping User Guide.

Monitoring Transactions

A transaction occurs when a user or synthetic robot makes a request to a monitored application. Depending on the components in your installation, Foglight APM can capture and correlate transactional activity at multiple layers including:

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Real/synthetic user behavior

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Web requests and responses

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Web servers and application servers

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Application code execution

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Database I/O

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Operating systems

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Physical and virtual servers

With the Transactions dashboard, you can examine transactional data in the following ways:

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Fully-linked end-user to database transactions

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End-user transactions only (synthetic or real) aggregated by location or other details

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Application layer transactions only (Java™ EE or .NET®)

The tiles on the Transactions dashboard represent different transactional views. Use the table below to quickly determine the type of transaction, then review Investigating real user APM transactions or Investigating application server transactions for an overview of how to drill down for more information.

Transaction type icons

Table 1. Transaction type icons and links to full descriptions
Icon	Transaction Type
	Foglight APM for Real User Experience transaction. For more information, see Real User (APM) Performance detail view.
	Foglight Experience Monitor/Viewer End User transaction. For more information, see Real User (FxM) Performance detail view.
	Foglight for Java EE Technologies or Foglight for Microsoft .NET transaction. For more information, see Application Server detail view.
	Foglight Transaction Recorder Synthetic User transaction. For more information, see Synthetic Result detail view.
	Sequence. For more information, see Sequence tile.
	Pivot - Browsers. For more information, see Pivot tiles.
	Pivot - Content Types. For more information, see Pivot tiles.
	Pivot - Endpoints. For more information, see Pivot tiles.
	Pivot - Locations. For more information, see Pivot tiles.
	Pivot - OSes. For more information, see Pivot tiles.

For example, in the following image, the Physician group of tiles represents a real user perspective with pivot data. The performance summary on each tile includes an alarm state overview and other key metrics. For a full description of the metrics displayed on each type of tile, see APM Tile and View Reference.


	NOTE: If some of the transactional data that you want to investigate is not available in your installation, you may need to install and configure additional Foglight components, such as Foglight for Java EE Technologies.

Figure 1. The Transactions dashboard in Foglight.