Application Layer Monitoring

It's been some time since I set up "ManageEngine Applications Manager" to monitor our services availability and health status. Like many popular monitoring applications it provides SNMP (Monitoring resources like CPU, Memory, Network Interfaces, Disks) and ICMP (Monitoring Layer 3 availability) monitoring but it goes beyond that by sending application specific probes to make sure different applications and services are available and healthy. A variety of application and services are supported like:

• POP3 and SMTP
• Web Server monitoring: This includes IIS and Apache with the ability to perform URL Monitoring
• Database Monitoring: DB2, MS-SQL, MySQL, Oracle
• Microsoft .NET / Tomcat / JBoss / WebSphere Monitoing

For the complete list click here.
The top reason I choose ManageEngine was the ability to monitor URLs. We are hosting around 200 web sites and it happens that a single URL goes down while the web server itself is healthy and no sign of service fault can be recognized.
Currently I am using MS-SQL, MySQL, Apache and IIS monitors and I really like the outputs, Reports and Graphs. The GUI provides quick overall view and quick access to monitors and reports.
Another great thing is the SLA management feature which lets us defining different SLA levels and assign them to monitor groups and report when a monitoring group has violated SLA Agreement.
It is really crucial to have a complete logging and monitoring solution functioning up to the application layer. There are a lot of application layer monitoring systems available; Commercial and Free. Many vendors are now including this level of monitoring into their network monitoring products.
To learn more on Different Monitoring tools just visit: http://www.monitortools.com/