The IT Melting Pot!

Hi again all!

It’s been quite a long time since I wrote a blog post.. I’ve just been too busy working! 🙂

But this is a really cool capability that I think that many of you will like, how often do your company or service provider have a good way of monitoring availability, performance etc. from the public Internet? And if they do then most of the time the larger service providers will build a service and install their own probes on different geographical locations and then they charge quite a lot for this service, and every time you change your application the charge you again for modifying the scripts that the probes use etc.

What I’ve tried and now think is going to be great for both smaller and larger organisations is the Azure Application Insights service. It’s really great and can assist with just this, it’s a service that microsoft provide from their locations globally where you can test your apps in Azure or course but also any web site out there on the Internet. And it doesn’t stop there, you can also use the server installer to also provide metrics from your Windows IIS server up to Azure to get more detailed statistics about the web server itself and requests etc.

Just think about how much it would take for you to setup monitoring from APAC, Americas and Europe for your NetScaler environment.. that would not be done in 10 minutes if you talk to your standard service provider. It took me 10 minutes to setup this reporting to ensure that the NetScaler is available from different locations around the world:

And this is just a simple url ping test to ensure that we get a proper 200 OK response from our EnvokeIT Lab environment that my colleague Björn have setup and modified so nicely with the X1 StoreFront look & feel.

Of course you can make a more proper test than just a url ping test like in this case, the service supports multi-step tests and also content matching etc. It’s also very easy to create one application/service that then consists of multiple locations that you want to monitor, for instance if you’re using GSLB FQDNs as well as regional to ensure that you get the full picture.

More information about what can be done you can find on the Azure Application Insights  page. 

As you can see below also is that I monitor the service from different locations across the world: Stockholm, Sydney, Miami and Hong Kong.

You can also determine how crucial the monitoring shall be:

• High sensitivity will create an alert whenever a test failure is detected in just 1 location.
• Medium sensitivity requires at least half of the locations have seen a failure in 10 minutes.
• Low sensitivity requires that the test at all locations have failed within 15 minutes.

Björn was also kind enough to install the Application Insights “agent” on the Windows Server where StoreFront is installed so that I get more data pushed up to Azure Application Insights:

This is awesome! I just love all the capabilities that Microsoft is pushing out as Azure services!

If you need assistance with any type of monitoring and reporting service or strategy contact us at EnvokeIT!

//Richard