Application Monitoring

Has anyone ever wondered about the various measures each business takes to ensure their products that are generating revenue and are not susceptible to fraud! Well, most of us would usually just test a product during purchase or immediately after its arrival to see the expected results, check for any discrepancies or defects and take action against the same.

Many Non-IT enterprises, like hotels are taking an extra step to ensure that the most critical application or feature is functioning the way it is supposed to even if it is not in daily use. For instance the entire top end hotels test their fire alarms daily so if any fire disaster occurs they are well prepared as it should be, else it would affect their reputation and affect the business. In this case devoting time and resources is considered as an investment and a duty that yields the expected results. Many of us either owning a big firm, owning a small business to being an end user or comprising of a support team, we barely take the necessary time out or invest in monitoring the performance and security of the applications we use in our business.

To initiate application monitoring tasks, respective teams or business units can have an opportunity to engage stakeholders in programs that can give in quantifiable risk mitigation values. Due to inherent challenges projects to implement Application Performance Monitoring and Application Security Monitoring needs to be undertaken for worthy efforts. The later part of this blog would provide an overview of application monitoring activities.

Application Security Monitoring

Moving the focus to applications, since they are the very susceptible to attacks and hacks from any corner of the world and every second there are security breaches to n number of businesses. Hackers now days are very organized and have gained momentum by their techniques that facilitate their combination of targets and the attacks to be unique. Hacking into organizations, criminal enterprises, and financial institutions is commonplace. None of the methods used are repetitive and are difficult to detect since it kills the purpose of the hacker to breach the security walls of your critical applications – in turn your business.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

Moreover the only solution to this is not just securing the perimeter but to have APM to detect and diagnose problems related to not fulfilling expected level of service of the application being used by the end users. APM literally means measuring the metrics mentioned in the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) defined by the organization or defined by the vendors in case of Software as a Service (SaaS) or as third-party applications.

Two important metrics that is strictly observed are:

1. Load performance – depending upon the amount of transactions per second the application in encountered with will define bottlenecks and the inadequacy / adequacy to support the load.
2. Response time performance – with respect to the above load or traffic encountered by the application the response that the user experiences is observed

All the above findings will help identify a baseline of the applications capacity to perform in different scenarios and if any attacks are taken place the deviation in the performance would help in notifying about the abnormalities.

Monitoring application performance is the critical and essential foremost line of defense against capturing all types of failures, right from configuration problems to security threats. By this means any events that unusual events are identified and reported that work as an early warning to take appropriate actions.

New generation of application monitoring should be dynamic, adaptable and agile; it should be able to create instances of applications on the fly and do its job and report the problems that have been captured, post which it should dissolve itself once the task is completed. All of this would help in gaining insights of the actual performance of the application and will support in defining a baseline for actual performance monitoring.

About Author:

Onkar Lalla is a Consultant and an important part of the Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd think tank. Within Systems Plus, he actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. He can be contacted at onkar.l@spluspl.com