A holistic view of the application delivery infrastructure is not complete without looking at the performance and availability of the network and storage infrastructure. Access to this data is dependent upon the hosting strategy being employed. Administrator level access to the network and storage infrastructure provides a wealth of data. This data may be collected via SNMP with System Shepherd® agents, or just about any other monitoring solution. If access to the network and storage infrastructure is limited, data collection will require a bit of creativity. One method is to correlate data from ping and port monitoring from various points within the architecture with individual server or virtual machine networking statistics. This provides a view of network behavior. On the storage side, individual server (or virtual machine) physical storage metrics can be used to obtain a partial picture of storage performance.

Real-Time Application Analysis

Once the above recommendations are implemented, data will then be available for analysis. The key is to be able to use the data to improve application delivery from the perspective of the end-user and the business. Regardless of the tools or services used to collect the data, it needs to be accessible in one place to maximize the value of the monitoring solution. The best practice in this area is to provide the technical teams with proactive alerting. Proactive alerting requires configurable alarm and escalation rules and the ability to perform real-time or near real-time analysis on the data in both ad-hoc and standard views.