I Want to Know if Applications Work OK

If you want an overview of how quickly your organization's critical applications respond, you can add the Application Performance Overview widget to a dashboard.

The widget can show information about any application—including web-based activities—that your PerformanceGuard administrator has defined.

You can use the widget to find out if individual computers or locations experience longer response times than others. This can help you identify, for example, if network problems cause an application to work slowly when particular colleagues use it.
Application Dashboard

The PerformanceGuard application dashboard (DASHBOARDS > Application Dashboard) gives you an overview of the status of important applications in your organization.

The application dashboard shows you whether applications perform on an acceptable level. If not, it will show you the extent to which your organization is affected. You can drill down to see exactly which subnets and computers affected.

Typical examples of applications are Exchange servers, domain controllers, DNS, file servers, or any other business-critical applications. It's your PerformanceGuard administrator who defines which applications you can view.

It's possible to view multiple types of status for a single application. For example, you can monitor availability as well as response times for the same application, if your PerformanceGuard administrator has set that up.
Colors Show Application Status
On the application dashboard an application can have one of four states:

1. Normal (green): Everything is fine.

1. Warning (yellow): Some users are affected.

1. Error (orange): A higher number of users are affected.

1. Critical (red): An even higher number of users are affected.

The thresholds that define when the status changes are set up by your PerformanceGuard administrator.
Why is it possible to see a green status, even though it says that some users are affected?  This may happen if, for example, your administrator has decided that 3 users must be affected before the status should change.
Status Is Updated Every Minute
Watch the thin blue line at the top of the application dashboard to see the amount of time that remains until the next update.
If you don't want to wait, click the Update Now icon to update the application dashboard manually.
Drill Down to View Affected Users
With the application dashboard you can quickly drill down from a general application status to the individual affected users and computers:

1. Click the application status:

1. You can now see which locations/networks are affected, and how many users are affected at each location/network:

Click a location/network name to drill further down.

1. You can now see which computers are affected at the selected location/network:

Click the name of a computer to view details about the individual computer.
Special user rights may be required to view details about individual computers in your organization. Ask your PerformanceGuard administrator if in doubt.
Video: Use Application Dashboard
Can't you view the video?  Do you use Internet Explorer? Older versions of Internet Explorer may have difficulty displaying video content. This will often be the case if your computer runs Windows XP, which can't use the latest versions of Internet Explorer. Try to view this help in a browser like Chrome instead. Do you use Firefox? If the video is "black," the video will often load if you click the Pause button. If not, try to view this help in a browser like Chrome instead.
Set Up the Application Dashboard
You can only do this if you're a PerformanceGuard administrator.
See Application Dashboard Setup for Administrators.
Frequently Asked Questions About Availability
The application dashboard is able to show the availability of applications, but what is availability?
When is something considered to be available?  To answer this we need to look at response times: If response times are so long that use of a service, website, transaction or similar becomes impossible, PerformanceGuard considers the service, etc. to be unavailable. By default, PerformanceGuard loses its patience with a service, etc. if it hasn't responded within 500,000 milliseconds (that's a little more than eight minutes). Everything that's not unavailable, is considered by PerformanceGuard to be available. So, if you see that a service has been 100% available during the last week, it means that it has not exceeded the acceptable response time limit during the last week. Do you measure availability of application pings (HTTP requests, ICMP ping and/or traceroutes)?For application pings, PerformanceGuard looks not only at acceptable response times, but also at whether a response is expected or not: If the response is unexpected, for example if the response has a response code of 404 Not Found, PerformanceGuard considers the service to be unavailable, even if the response was received within acceptable time.
I just set up a new server. Nobody has used it yet. How can it be 100% available?  Bear in mind that PerformanceGuard looks at your new server based on how the PerformanceGuard agents experience it: If none of the computers with PerformanceGuard agents have used the new server, there have not been any unacceptably long response times, and the server has thus not been unavailable. Everything that's not unavailable, is considered by PerformanceGuard to be available, and that explains the 100% availability, even though nobody has yet used your new server.
Application Report
In addition to the normal IP traffic reports aggregated by location, you can also view aggregated IP traffic data per computer per application.
Aggregation is the gathering of separate data in a summarized form. If, for example, you have performance data about a computer from every minute that computer has been online, you can aggregate that data into an average from every hour. That way, you won 'tneed to store so much data, but you'll still be able to view trends in the computer's performance. Read more in Aggregation of Data.
In PerformanceGuard the term application doesn't necessarily mean a single software program. Instead it means a collection of things that your organization finds it meaningful to measure the performance of together. Therefore, your PerformanceGuard administrator must have defined these things and set up trend aggregation before you can use application reporting; see Set Up Application Reporting.
If we assume that everything has been set up, here is how to run an application report:

1. Select ANALYZE > Computers > Application Report.
2. Select the required application (remember that an application can be a collection of things that your organization finds it meaningful to measure the performance of together).
3. In the Agents menu, select required group of computers.
4. Select required interval. If the predefined intervals don't suit you, select Custom to specify your own interval.
5. Click the Run button.
6. After a short while you can select between downloading your application report as an Excel spreadsheet, adding it to a report, or exporting it.

BTM Tags/Agents
With the BTM Tags/Agents bar chart (ANALYZE > Graphs > Combined Bar Charts > BTM Tags/Agents) you can compare transactions and groups of computers with respect to availability, response times and number of requests for transactions reported by the PerformanceGuard BTM feature. By selecting multiple tags and computer groups you can compare combinations of these tags and groups.
BTM, Business Transaction Monitoring, is a feature for monitoring complex activity that involve multiple steps and/or multiple servers. It essentially works as a stop watch that lets you record the time it takes to execute a complex activity. BTM is very flexible: PerformanceGuard simply provides a set of building blocks that your organization can use to integrate with other applications and define relevant transactions.
A transaction is some sort of complex activity that your organization wants to measure, for example how long time it takes to connect to a price database and update product prices. Due to the flexibility of BTM many types of activity can be measured as a transaction, depending on what's relevant in your organization. If the names of transactions and transaction groups in your organization are not immediately meaningful to you, ask your PerformanceGuard administrator for advice.
This graph is useful because ... you can compare transactions, including transactions across groups of computers. This way you can, for example, verify if all of your organization's locations are able to carry out transactions without problems or delays.

1. Transaction group: Transactions may grouped, for example into finance transactions, human resources transactions, etc. If that's the case in your organization, select which group of transactions you want to base the graph on.
2. Transaction: Select which transaction you want to base the graph on. If you selected a transaction group in the previous field, you can only select transactions from that group.
3. Tags: Select which transaction tag (if any available) you want to view on the graph. You can select multiple tags by pressing the CTRL key while you select tags.

What's a tag?  A transaction tag is used to identify a variant of a transaction. For example, if you have a transaction called Print, you could have a Color tag for color prints and a Grayscale tag for non-color prints. Tags are not always used, so don't worry if you are not able to select any.

1. Type: Determines which type of value the graph will contain, for example response times in seconds.
2. Agents: Select which computer groups the bar chart should be based on. You can select multiple groups by pressing the CTRL key while selecting groups.
3. X-axis Min and Max: Enter the required range for the bar chart's horizontal axis. If you leave the fields empty, the range will automatically reflect the minimum and maximum values found in the data.
4. Interval: Select the period of time that the graph should cover. If the predefined intervals don't suit you, select Custom to specify your own interval.

When is something considered to be available?  To answer this we need to look at response times: If response times are so long that use of a service, website, transaction or similar becomes impossible, PerformanceGuard considers the service, etc. to be unavailable. By default, PerformanceGuard loses its patience with a service, etc. if it hasn't responded within 500,000 milliseconds (that's a little more than eight minutes). Everything that's not unavailable, is considered by PerformanceGuard to be available. So, if you see that a service has been 100% available during the last week, it means that it has not exceeded the acceptable response time limit during the last week. Do you measure availability of application pings (HTTP requests, ICMP ping and/or traceroutes)?For application pings, PerformanceGuard looks not only at acceptable response times, but also at whether a response is expected or not: If the response is unexpected, for example if the response has a response code of 404 Not Found, PerformanceGuard considers the service to be unavailable, even if the response was received within acceptable time.