Do you control and monitor what applications run on your corporate network?

Application monitoring just like overall network monitoring is a vital IT function for corporate organizations. From employee productivity with the various applications to infrastructure maintenance, Application monitoring can help businesses to embark on business objectives, and save costs in all corners of their corporate structure.

Application monitoring will let your organization know when the organization’s main line of business apps, or their related databases, email system, etc… are not performing properly. Proper app monitoring software will give you a visual dashboard to trend usage, performance, and growth. All these are extremely important for capacity planning, meeting SLAs, and identifying malicious applications on the corporate network to rectify threats before they cause outages.

Issue Analysis

The Application Monitoring field is large, and there are even a couple of mature, well used open-source options, such as Nagios and Hyperic which provide powerful monitoring solutions for all sizes of business. In addition to these open-source options, there are several commercial options available as well. SolarWinds has a powerful APM module for their Orion integrated management system, which can monitor your applications without an agent installation. There are also options from ManageEngine, which work in a similar fashion to the SolarWinds product line.

An organization’s top priority should be to ensure that its applications are running at their peak efficiency – with minimal downtime. It is for this reason that APM (Application Performance Management) tools are essential in enhancing user experiences.

There are a lot of application performance management tools on the market today. However, the primary goal is to find a comprehensive tool that is focused on enhancing the end-user experience.

Why Application monitoring is vital to your organization?

As companies grow, the activities and requirements of their staff inevitably become more complex. The set of applications needed within the network can expand rapidly. This can be exacerbated by staff preferences when an individual finds the standard tool in use in your environment does not offer the user experience they are used to from previous positions.

It’s important to restrict users to only known and trusted applications managed and maintained by IT staff, and prevent installation and use of any other tools or solutions.

A good rule of thumb is to operate by least privilege: only give users access to what they need for their work, and nothing more. By controlling and limiting what applications each user has access to, you can hinder even a successful attacker’s attempts at accessing your sensitive files. Plus, with central management software, not only can you instantly view the login attempts and block a specific user or device, but you can revise access controls to lock down your data and services.

With the help of central Application monitoring tools you are able to;

To observe app components – Components may include servers, databases, and message queues or catches.
Anomaly detection – This can vary from simple threshold detection to advanced machine learning pattern recognition. This allows for the detection of malicious applications on the corporate networks and scrapping them off from use.
To provide app dashboards and alerts – Dashboards give an overview, and alerts drive attention to specific application problems.
Distributed tracing – Tracking how one event connects across multiple nodes to detect the origins of errors.
Dependency & flow mapping – A visual representation of how requests travel between services.