Formerly known as Application Performance Overview

The Application Chart widget can show the availability and response times of your organization's business-critical applications. It can also show how many sessions use the applications, and how many requests the applications get.
The widget can show this information about any application—including web-based activities—that your PerformanceGuard administrator has defined.
You can use the widget to, for example, find out if individual computers or locations have availability issues or longer response times than others. This in turn can help you identify if network problems cause an application to work slowly when particular colleagues use it.

Select what You Want to View

Your PerformanceGuard administrator has typically set up the widget to show information about one or more metrics (for example availability and response time) for one or more applications.
When that's the case, you can simply use the Computers and Locations menus in the top part of the dashboard to view how the application performs when a particular computer or location uses it.

You can select multiple computers and locations to compare how an application performs across computers and locations.

When you use the Locations menu, there's a search field that you can use to search for locations.

In some cases your administrator may let you select applications and application performance metrics yourself. When that's the case, you can select the exact information you require from the Applications and Application performance metrics menus in the top part of the dashboard.

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.

Set Up the Widget

You can only do this if you're a PerformanceGuard administrator.

Before you set up the widget, you need to find out if you have defined the applications that you want to be able to view in the widget.
When you're ready to add the widget to a dashboard, you simply select the required information in the widget setup dialog's Applications and Application performance metrics menus.

Many applications and metrics in the same widget can be confusing. It's better to use multiple widgets with a few items in each.

Show Application Details

The widget by default shows one graph per application. However, one application may run on several different servers, so it can be useful to see if all of those servers perform equally well.
To see this, click the widget's icon. This will split single application graphs into one graph per server that runs the application, including servers for which there's no data in the selected time period.
For web activities, it will split the single graphs into one graph per web activity element that PerformanceGuard measures.

Example: If your administrator has set up PerformanceGuard to measure each image on a web page, you will see a graph for each image if you click the

icon.

Connect All Samples

The samples in the graph will by default be Automatic . If you don't want this you can select Connect All or set them to Disconnect All .

Resolution

To sort the large data-sets and view them more clearly in the graph, click the widget's resolution icon.
You can use resolution when you have a large number of individual graphic elements that you can not distinguish between them. It is very similar to the idea of putting data into categories / class as it divides the data values into a set of disjoint intervals called Bins. It will allow you to group individual data values into one instance of graphic element.

You can select from the lowest time interval such as (1 min) to the highest interval such as (1 week, 1 month).

Example: You can see a significant difference in display of data values from 04:00 to 08:00 when resolution is selected at the intervals of 30 min, 1 hour and 4 hours allowing you to visualize data in ways that are meaningful. Click thumbnail to view image in full size.

The data values which fall in to those selected respective intervals, a bin, are replaced by a value representative of that interval. The data outside of the [start, end] range is discarded and thus will not be displayed on the graph.

Toggle Minimum and Maximum Values Off and On

The widget by default shows average, minimum and maximum values. To toggle the minimum and maximum values off and on, click the widget's icon.
When you view minimum and maximum values, you can reveal otherwise hidden peaks in resource usage.
The difference can be dramatic. Look at this example: When we view average values, the highest average value is 18, but when we view the minimum and maximum values, the maximum value for the same period turns out to be 79.

How can the maximum value be much higher than the average? PerformanceGuard has typically sampled data many times between the data points in the graph. The maximum value is the highest value that PerformanceGuard has recorded when it sampled data in the interval between the points on the graph, but the maximum value may not have occurred very often, and therefore it may not contribute very much to the average value. The same principle applies to minimum values.

Adjust Vertical Axis (Y-Axis)

To adjust the vertical axis of a graph, click the widget's icon. If the graph has multiple vertical axes, you can adjust each axis separately.
When you adjust an axis, bear in mind that you won't be able to see data points that are outside the range that you specify.

STATISTICS

When you view the graph, you can also see a Statistics table by switching to Statistics mode . Statistics icon will not be visible if there is no data available.
Note that the Statistics table shows the weighted average for the graph's samples. That means that each value to be averaged is assigned a weight based on the number of occurrences of that value.

Zoom

To zoom in, click and drag across the required area of the timeline.

Thresholds

Display of thresholds is by default on. When you view a graph, you can toggle threshold display off by selecting Hide thresholds. This can be useful, for example if you think that a threshold blocks your view of the graph's data points.
If no event threshold is available, the toggle button will be inactive or hidden.
Thresholds are only relevant for certain types of data e.g. Response time (ms).

For such data, a threshold i.e. a baseline that the displayed values must ideally be below — can be displayed as a red horizontal line in the graph when:

Your PerformanceGuard administrator has predefined such thresholds i.e. select ADMINISTRATION > Event Management > Event Rules (or create a new event rule).
You have selected location, one server group and one agent group. You can also create new location from ADMINISTRATION > Computer Grouping > Locations.

In order to have thresholds displayed on the graph, both the above mentioned conditions must be applied i.e. an event rule must be created with a selection of a matching set of parameters.
An event is a threshold violation on an individual computer or server e.g. a response time that isn't acceptable. The event rules define the nature of the triggered event, and the parameters for capturing event-related information in an application. These events are categorized by severity levels.
After creating an event rule you can view these threshold lines on the graph. They work as an indicator on the graph providing you with target context and allowing you to identify application when the response time becomes higher or lower than the threshold's set level. On the graph each threshold has a name with its location, so it is easy for you to see what the threshold is about.
Example: In this example administrator has set the Lower Threshold as 20.0 ms for the DNS application for the IP Service - Response Time event. You can see in the following image where Response Time for DNS application has exceeded the limit than the level set in event rule. This threshold indication is concerning and alarming for the administrator / user. Click thumbnail to view image in full size.
When you select different locations or computers on your widget - threshold display might not be available, depending on how the thresholds have been defined i.e. which locations were selected when the event rules were created by the administrator.
Why do I see more than one threshold on a graph? This is because your PerformanceGuard administrator is able to set up multiple thresholds for the same type of data. This can be useful in order to indicate different levels of severity, for example if values above 80 are acceptable for short periods of time, whereas values above 90 require immediate attention.
Threshold becomes invisible if you click all the legends to make the series hidden i.e. it will stay visible if there is even one legend visible. If a graph has thresholds, the thresholds will also appear if you use the graph in a report, except when they're hidden.
You can also enable Adaptive Baselining on this widget, read more about Adaptive Baselining.
Widgets supporting Threshold functionality
The following are the widgets that support Threshold functionality:
Application Performance Overview Widget
A threshold for the metric Response Times can be set in Event Management using the Event Rule 'IP Service - Response Time'

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Application Chart Widget