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In-Depth Information
events. Some companies develop their own tools for management or build man-
agement consoles directly into their products. For many companies, application
management comes from the platform that hosts their application: the web or
application server.
When the bicycle shop web site and application were developed, you had to
consider the health of not only your application, but also the application server,
web server, and database (as well as any other software systems). Without a stan-
dard and consistent management platform, you might have to write specific code
in order to expose application properties, health, and statistics. In fact, the man-
ner in which you manage your application will likely change if you purchase a
different monitoring solution.
In today's typical management environment,
IT
personnel will always be in a
reactionary mode when maintaining applications. Hardware and application
management solutions are often developed
ad hoc
at deployment time. In fact,
currently it is difficult to develop a generic, reusable management and monitor-
ing solution for applications.
1.1.2
The ideal management environment
An ideal management environment would have a proactive capability for dealing
with problems. A management system would constantly monitor the health of
both devices and applications. If a device was down, the management system
could discover an alternative device, reroute services to the alternate, and notify
the administrator of the problem. For instance, if the bicycle shop's web site was
down or started to experience too much load, the management system could
change some of the services the application provides, notify participating ser-
vices to find an alternate service provider, and notify the administrator that
problems exist. The management system could even start secondary web sites
and services to take the load off the initial application.
Ideal management systems not only would be aware of the health of the
applications, but also would have knowledge of application internals. For exam-
ple, the management solution could quickly produce reports comparing success-
ful and failed bicycle shop transactions. On the system management level, the
number of threads executing could be changed at runtime. The management
system would make informed decisions and take action based on information it
gathered from applications and devices.
Unfortunately, an ideal management system would take too much time and
development resources to achieve. In addition to writing the management tools,
you might need to write custom interfaces for your applications and network
