July 31, 2007
In my previous blog entry on July 17th I continued talking about defining SLAs. Here I complete that conversation.
In Longitude, you can either use the Statistics Dashboard or the SLA itself to observe transaction response times and get a reasonable first cut estimate for values to use as degraded/unacceptable thresholds. In the statistics dashboard, simply create a widget for the transaction you’re incorporating into your SLA and select “Response Time” as the Statistic to monitor. If you use the SLA itself, the transaction may not be visible in the SLA dashboard if there haven’t been any transaction failures. In that case, select the “Healthy Computers” check box to the left of the SLA detail diagram - the pie chart will be completely green, but each transaction will be listed with an average Response Time value, and an available detail graph displaying a timeline graph of the Response Time values.
A couple of additional notes on Transactions in SLAs: first, you need to register a Transaction in Manage Monitoring before it’s available to either the Statistics Dashboard or SLAs. Second, Ping transaction response times can be very helpful in finding slowdowns in distributed applications. It is possible for all the discrete SLA components to be perfectly well behaved, and not display any problems - but the network connecting them may be preventing the components from communicating effectively. The response time from the Ping Transaction can help to track down phantom performance problems that don’t show up on any of the individual SLA components.
I hope these tips on defining SLAs are helpful in your monitoring strategies. For more information about SLAs you can download our white paper at http://www.heroix.com/aspscript/wp_sla_form.asp.
Posted by Susan Bilder, Senior Technical Consultant
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