Web Application Performance Monitoring
Solve critical problems quickly
Solve critical problems quickly
- Application pools: Worker processes, cache, requests, and threads
- Websites: Connections, network I/O, files, requests, and HTTP bindings
- Connections: Total connections, current connections, logon attempts, etc.
- Cache: Cache hits, URI cache, file cache, memory usage, etc.
Optimize infrastructure resource utilization
Optimize infrastructure resource utilization
Be the first to know about performance issues
Be the first to know about performance issues
- Agentlessly and securely test and monitor web application and website performance
- Identify and diagnose response time for web page elements, such as CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Images, etc. Monitor website and user experience from multiple locations inside and outside your firewall.
Identify infrastructure dependencies
Identify infrastructure dependencies
Get More on Website Application Monitoring
What is a web application?
A web application is a program or software that is accessible through any web browser. Some of the most common web apps include online retail sales, email, instant messaging services, and online auction services.
Web applications are often confused with websites, which are defined as a group of interlinked web pages that share a single domain name and can be accessed through a network. While web applications are technically websites, not all websites are web applications.
The ability for users to manipulate the page is the distinguishing feature of web apps. Even if the web apps have content, that content is dynamic. This distinction means that web applications offer the user significantly more interaction than they could achieve with a website. While this is the primary distinction between the two, there are also more specific differences between web applications and websites, covering everything from their deployment and authentication requirements to the user interaction.
How does a web application work?
A web application works according to these steps:
- First a user accesses the web application through a mobile app or through a web browser. That triggers a request to the web server through the internet.
- From there the general web server forwards the request to the web app server, which performs the requested task (whether it’s querying a database, processing data, etc.) and generates the requested data results.
- The web app server sends those results back to the general web server.
- Finally, the web server delivers the requested info back to the client so it can appear on the user’s display.
Every web application is made up of two parts: the front end and the back end. The front end (or client-side) is executed by the web browser and, as the name suggests, is the part of the app that the user interacts with. It is typically created using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, though other technologies can be used as well.
The back end (or server-side) is usually executed by a remote server that executes the back end code. That code is typically written in Java, Python, C#, PHP, or other common languages. The back end is at the core of steps 2-4 of the process outlined above.
To make sure that all the elements of your web app are working properly it’s important that you engage in website application monitoring.
What are the different types of web application monitoring?
There are a number of different forms of web application monitoring. There are three basic levels to web application performance monitoring, each of which includes several types of monitors. The levels of web app monitoring are:
External website monitoring:
This level of web application monitoring focuses on system performance from the end-user perspective. It includes:
- Reachability monitoring
- Status code monitoring
- Response time monitoring
- Full-page load-time monitoring
Application level monitoring:
This level of website application monitoring collects and stores application stack data using an agent-based approach. This level of monitoring is particularly important for identifying and troubleshooting problems before they impact end users. Application level monitoring includes:
- Service uptime monitoring
- Web server performance monitoring
- Database performance monitoring
- Error logging and monitoring of log files
Server (OS) level monitoring:
This level of web application monitoring is focused on tracking the hardware and infrastructure resources that are essential to the success of a web app. It includes:
- RAM monitoring
- CPU monitoring
- Disk monitoring
- Network monitoring
Why is web application monitoring important?
Web application monitoring is incredibly important for both users and for businesses. Without it, proactively detecting and diagnosing web application performance issues before they impact users is practically impossible. Issues like slow web application response time and web server overload can cause serious issues if you can’t locate the bottlenecks impacting responsiveness and end-user experience.
When your web application is having issues with response times and overall performance, users can quickly get annoyed or tired of waiting, leaving the web app and moving elsewhere. That can lead directly to lost business opportunities as well as unhappy customers who may start overwhelming you with tickets. With effective web application performance monitoring—which is always at its best with a quality automated web application monitoring solution like SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM)—you can respond to potential issues fast, driving user satisfaction and potentially boosting your business.
What does a web application monitoring tool do?
Web application monitoring tools give you complete visibility into your application, helping you track all the essential infrastructure components that can impact your web application. That includes monitoring your databases, web servers, virtualizations, hardware, and more.
Instead of having to navigate between a variety of tools that each give you insight into just one of these elements of the system, a quality automated web application monitoring solution gives you visibility into all of these components from a single dashboard. Not only do web application monitoring tools monitor the transaction user experience, page load times, and the related infrastructure performance, they also make it easier to put all that collected data in context thanks to their unified dashboards. Plus, your web app monitoring solution will alert you when it detects an issue with any of the elements it’s tracking. It can then arm you with information that makes it easier to identify the root cause of that issue.
To get all these benefits, all you have to do is open your website application monitoring tool, pick the node you want monitored, and select the monitors you want for that node. The tool will automatically start its web application performance monitoring from there.
How does web application monitoring work in SAM?
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers powerful, customizable website application monitoring that helps you ensure your web apps are performing as expected.
When it comes to choosing your web application monitoring tools, it’s important that whatever you choose includes hardware monitoring functions. SAM does just that, automatically monitoring metrics like disk capacity, CPU utilization, memory usage, and more. The tool also tracks a variety of other essential metrics tied to web apps, including those tied to application pools, connections, and cache. Insight into these metrics can make it easier to balance your resource allocation and server load.
When it comes to web application performance monitoring, one of SAM’s biggest strengths is the volume and quality of its out-of-box templates. Out of its 1,200+ built-in templates, more than 250 are application monitor templates that you can assign to your nodes (the representations of your web apps within the SolarWinds Orion Platform) to start monitoring changes. Each of the templates has one or more component monitors designed to monitor a specific element of your node.
Another key element of SAM’s website application monitoring is its custom application monitoring feature. Not only does SAM make it easy to customize its templates and monitors to fit your specific needs, you can also create custom monitors to suit your custom web applications. With just a few clicks you can import custom scripts, implement and edit community-generated templates (which are made and shared on THWACK®), or build new templates and component monitors from scratch.
What is a web application?
A web application is a program or software that is accessible through any web browser. Some of the most common web apps include online retail sales, email, instant messaging services, and online auction services.
Web applications are often confused with websites, which are defined as a group of interlinked web pages that share a single domain name and can be accessed through a network. While web applications are technically websites, not all websites are web applications.
The ability for users to manipulate the page is the distinguishing feature of web apps. Even if the web apps have content, that content is dynamic. This distinction means that web applications offer the user significantly more interaction than they could achieve with a website. While this is the primary distinction between the two, there are also more specific differences between web applications and websites, covering everything from their deployment and authentication requirements to the user interaction.
"We had an incident with a web server certificate that wasn’t automatically renewing. AppInsight for IIS gave us the time needed to fix the problem before it became an issue."
Craig Hicks
System Administrator
MMM Group Limited
Troubleshoot web application issues faster
Server & Application Monitor
- Automatic application discovery and server monitoring.
- Quickly monitor the performance and availability of Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS services.
- Built-in templates provide best practices.
Starts at
SAM, an Orion module, is built on the SolarWinds Platform