Now that Labor Day has come and gone and kids are back in school, many of us are reorienting ourselves after summer vacation. If you were able to plan ahead for vacation time performance monitoring, perhaps you are coming back to a reasonably orderly situation. Even the best laid plans are subject to change, though, and it’s likely that at least something about your IT infrastructure or application workload changed while you were away. With Longitude software for application performance monitoring, if you come back to some unexpected performance or availability events, or if you’re just not sure what to expect when you return to the office, there are some easy ways to get back in the driver’s seat:

• Run an event report (application events as well as SLA events) to get a quick look at what happened over the past week or two. Then dig in with your favorite Event Monitor dashboard.
• Use the Event Monitor’s pulldown filters to focus in on events based on severity, time of occurrence, or application; work on the most urgent events, and once they’re cleared up you can change the filter and move on to the less critical issues.
• Use the Event Monitor’s drill-down features to learn more about unfamiliar events and their underlying root causes.
• If an event is being triggered too easily, you can change performance thresholds right in the Event Monitor, and Longitude will show you average, minimum and maximum workload values to help you make the right adjustments.
• Remember that you can enable actions right from the Event Monitor, and you can even suspend events if you don’t want to keep receiving notifications while you work on a problem.

Regardless of whether you use Longitude, another commercial network monitoring software product, or your own home grown scripts, try to do a little monitoring tune-up like this on a regular basis - monthly is probably sufficient - to keep your application performance monitoring practices up to date. It’s a little like cleaning out your Inbox or your coat closet at home - doing it as you go can be a real time saver in the long run.