When was the last time you really explored the performance of your web application? I mean really explored it? You may be content just knowing whether your cool new website service is up and running but what if you could be a little more proactive without requiring a degree in computer science?

One of the big problems with web based applications today is their lack of ability to scale (see Is Your Website Suffering From Scaling Issues?), something that is particularly highlighted during sudden surges of demand – which can often bring a website down. Gauging the performance of your site, and gaining a good understanding of its normal operating conditions, can be tricky. This trickiness largely stems from the fact that there is precious little meaningful information available to the everyday person. You might be able to look around the performance counters or log files on each of your servers but would you have any idea what it is telling you and would you know what to do about it?

An interesting application that may offer some help is AppFirst – an application infrastructure monitoring platform. I had the opportunity to have a chat with Pamela Roussos, CMO of AppFirst, to talk a little more about the product and how it can help.  Pamela told me “AppFirst aims to help us understand our web applications better – by providing useful and up to date information.”

For a start, take a look at the image on the right which is one of the widgets from the AppFirst Dashboard. I don’t know about you but I find some comfort in knowing that this particular web application has 100% uptime and a 183ms average response time. You can switch the widget to show five minute updates, hourly, daily, weekly, and even monthly.

If you are familiar with products such as PacketTrap and SpiceWorks you may find the dashboard style interface familiar, with widgets which can be dragged and dropped as required. However, where those applications aim to help with managing and monitoring your network infrastructure AppFirst priority is firmly on your application performance.

 

To get AppFirst up and running you need to install a collector on each of your servers. The collector is a small, low overhead, application that sits between the server operating system and the application and literally collects information about system process interaction, file access, network activity and other useful information. This information is fed into the AppFirst back-end servers ready for analysis. Collectors exist for Windows (32-bit and 64-bit) and various flavours of Linux (Ubuntu 9/10 32-bit and 64-bit, Red Hat 5, CentOS 5.3-5.5 32-bit and 64-bit). For Windows you just need to download the collector application and install it on your service, Linux users can use the wget/dpkg and rpm commands as appropriate. Cloud users are also catered for with support for adding collectors to Amazon EC2 and Rackspace Cloud servers.

Once collectors are installed and running, then information about the processes on your server will be available in the dashboard – through widgets. To make life easier this service information can be grouped into “Applications”, which could include, for example, your Apache based processes, Memcache processes, and of course the collector processes themselves.

In the next article we’ll take a closer look at AppFirst and what it has to offer. In the mean tine, to learn more head over and visit AppFirst.