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.