Application Performance Monitoring (APM) allows you to monitor Internet Information Services (IIS) hosted .NET and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) applications from both the server and client side perspectives. This allows you to use Operations Manager to collect detailed information about a specific application’s performance of reliability.
You use the .NET Application Performance Monitoring Template, available through the Authoring workspace of the Operations console, to configure Application Performance Monitoring. To view Application Performance Monitoring event details, it is necessary to have installed an instance of the Operations Manger web console. You’ll also have to import the following management packs and their dependencies:
- Windows Server 2008 IIS 7.0
- Operations Manager APM Web IIS 7
If monitoring Windows Server 2012 or Windows Server 2012 R2, you’ll need to import the following management packs and their dependencies:
- Microsoft Windows Server 2012 IIS 8
- Microsoft System Center APM Web IIS 8
Once these management packs are installed, you’ll be able to view the ASP.NET applications that Operations Manager finds in the Monitoring workspace, under Application Monitoring, under the .NET Monitoring node in the ASP.NET Web Application Inventory node. You’ll be able to view WCF applications under the IIS Hosted WCF Web Service Inventory node. Once APM discovers an application, IIS will usually need to be restarted. This allows the application pools to recycle, enabling the APM extensions, and allowing the APM function, to be registered with the application.
The server-side monitoring capabilities of APM include:
- Performance event monitoring and alerting
- Exception event monitoring and alerting
- Modifying performance event threshold
- Configuring performance event monitoring thresholds and sensitivity on a per-namespace or per-method basis
- onfiguring exception event monitoring types on a per-exception or per-exception handler basis.
The client-side monitoring capabilities of APM include:
- Performance event monitoring and alerting
- Exception event monitoring and alerting
- Performance event thresholds for:
- Page load
- Asynchronous JavaScript and XML
- WCF
- Collecting data related to images, scripts, CSS, HTML, global variables, and exception stack
- Collecting load balancer header data
To configure Application Performance Monitoring, perform the following steps:
1. In the Authoring workspace of the Operations Manager console, click Management Pack Templates, and then click Add Monitoring Wizard on the ribbon.
2. On the Monitoring Type page, shown in Figure 1, click .NET Application Performance Monitoring.
FIGURE 1 .NET Application Performance Monitoring template
3. On the General Properties page, provide the name of the monitor and specify an unsealed management pack in which to store the monitor files.
4. On the What To Monitor page, click Add. On the Object Search page, click Search. A list of web applications and services that have been discovered on servers that host the Operations Manager agent will be displayed. Select the applications that you want to manage, and click Add. This dialog box is shown in Figure 2.
FIGURE 2 Web application search
5. On the Server-Side configuration, select Enable Additional Configuration Options For Server-Side And Client-Side Monitoring, as shown in Figure 3, and then click Advanced Settings.
FIGURE 3 Server-side configuration
6. On the Advanced Settings page, review the current configuration, click Use Default Configuration, and then enable exception event monitoring for Application Failure Alerts, as shown in Figure 4.
FIGURE 4 Advanced monitoring settings
7. On the Server-Side Customization page, select the first segment, and click Customize. Verify that you can configure separate performance event monitoring settings for each application segment, and then click OK.
8. On the Client-Side Configuration page, enable performance event alerts and exception event alerts, as shown in Figure 5. Review the page load threshold, and Ajax and WCF threshold settings.
FIGURE 5 Client-side configuration
9. On the Enable Client-Side Monitoring, review the information presented, and then complete the wizard. Note that it is likely that you’ll need to restart IIS on the server that hosts the web application.
More Info: Application Performance Monitoring
You can learn more about Application Performance Monitoring at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh457578.aspx.
