Forefront TMG – The Successor of ISA 1. Native 64-bit and IPv6 support Forefront TMG is installed on Windows Server 2008 64-bit edition and is able to function even on Layer 2 of the OSI model, which means it can support the upper-level IPv6. Forefront uses the Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS) driver in order [...]

Much has been written about how to set up different monitoring tools to look after the health of your Linux servers. This article attempts to present a concise overview of the most important metrics available on Linux and the associated tools. CPU utilization CPU usage is usually the first place we look when a server [...]

The concept of an application transaction (also called a business transaction or an end-user transaction) is at the heart of Application Performance Monitoring (APM).  A previous three-part article, The APM Primer (part one, part two, and part three), described the basics of APM.  The article now before you delves a little deeper into APM’s core [...]

Website Performance: Taxonomy of Tips introduced a classification scheme to help us organize the many performance tips found on the Internet.  Today’s article reviews the tips in the third category, the-server-processes-the-request. Server-side scripting and services accessed by it (e.g., databases) will be reviewed in future articles. Today we look at the web server and its [...]

Files keep growing!  Then comes the ultimate crash when they’ve grown too much.  If you would like to monitor the number and size of the files in some directory on your server (and who wouldn’t), Mikayel Vardanyan shows you the easy way in Monitoring Files and Directories with Paid Monitor.Mikayel demonstrates how to use a Python [...]

Application Management (AM) includes project management, development, testing, quality assurance, release management, application monitoring, and responding to the information supplied by monitors.  Application Performance Monitoring(APM) is application monitoring that is focused on performance rather than security, availability, planning, or some other matter.This article is part three of a primer for those who have never heard [...]

Like it or not, your end-users will judge your website.  If, in their judgment, it is perceived to be slow, that judgment will partly determine how often they return.  It will also affect their friends’ decisions insomuch as user experiences are shared.  That’s why monitoring the user experienceis so important.Now on to the next step.  [...]

 Application Management (AM) includes project management, development, testing, quality assurance, release management, application monitoring, and responding to the information supplied by monitors.  Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is application monitoring that is focused on performance rather than security, availability, planning, or some other matter. This article is part one of a primer for those who have [...]

If you know Visual Basic and WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation), Hovhannes Avoyan’s article, How to Monitor Windows Servers with VBScript, WMI, and Paid Monitor, on the Paid Monitor blog is well worth a read.  It is a well-written article that shows how to monitor WMI data from the cloud.  All the VB code is included. The same [...]

Got Cacti? Proper disclosure – the author have never properly used Cacti as a monitoring system in a production environment. So what’s Cacti? – I’m not sure that after the proper disclosure I can actually comment too much, but from my first impression, Cacti is a fairly comprehensive server and network monitoring platform for Unix. It’ll support graphing [...]