Applications
Applications are a powerful construct to help you view and manage your infrastructure within AppFirst. At its core, your infrastructure consists of a lot of processes running on servers. An application is a logical collection of those processes and servers that make up components of your infrastructure. It can consist of any group of processes across any number of servers. Basically, applications are a representation of how you conceptualize your infrastructure. They can be defined broadly (ex. an application that includes all of your web servers), based on a single common trait (ex. an application that includes all of the Apache processes on all of your servers), or more specifically (ex. an application that consists of a single process on a single server).
Use applications for
- Comprehensive real-time monitoring
- Precise and useful alerting to discover deterministic root cause
- Quick and efficient resolution of issues before they become problems
The AppFirst solution shows you a detailed view of your infrastructure’s behavior. That’s a lot of data to take in all at once. So the question becomes: What is the most useful way for you to see that data? You can label applications based on how your infrastructure is set up. For instance:
- If you have business logic that only runs on one server –> select all the business logic-related processes on that server, and label that group as an application
- If your business logic runs across multiple servers –> select all the business logic-related processes across all the servers, and label that group as an application
Either way, when you view your business logic application, it will tell you useful information about the status of a group of related processes, and that is exactly what applications are supposed to do.
Once you have your applications set up, you’ll be amazed at how much you can do with that information! On the Dashboard, you can use applications to get a quick view of your current infrastructure performance. Using Data Insight, you can dig deeper to get a more detailed visualization of what’s going on in each application. Alerts in Alert Management can be based on applications, so that when you’re notified of a change in your infrastructure, you will know exactly which component of the infrastructure is affected.
The applications you create will be unique and will reflect the way you look at your infrastructure, which is why there are no pre-existing applications for you to use. However, some general ideas that may be useful to get you started would be: business logic, web servers, purchased components (ex. SharePoint, Exchange) or infrastructure components (ex. ERP, document handling).
