3.1.0
RTO PinPoint Overview
Introduction to RTO Software
RTO Software provides application-focused performance monitoring tools for any business-critical application in any Windows server environment. Whether you're charged with the performance of the business, the applications, or the server infrastructure, you're under constant pressure to maintain peak performance:
Line-of-business managers rely on server-based applications to operate
efficient business-critical processes and transactions that directly affect
productivity, financial performance, and customer satisfaction
IT departments need to quickly analyze performance problems to manage
the cost and complexity of technology investments and to more effectively
support business objectives
RTO Software provides monitoring solutions that help meet both objectives. While companies can't neglect monitoring servers, they also need the ability to recognize when the business problem is being caused by the application itself. RTO application performance monitoring products help business executives and IT departments increase the effectiveness of server-based business applications by providing them with actionable, easy-to-interpret information that lets them gain efficiencies and pre-empt application performance issues.
RTO PinPoint monitors mission-critical Windows server applications in real time to guide managers to specific performance issues before they degrade business operations.
RTO TScale® increases the performance, reliability, and capacity of thin-client, server-based computing, including Citrix and Microsoft® Terminal Services.
Introduction to RTO PinPoint
Performance/user response time is a common challenge faced by IT departments supporting business applications. In an effort to better enable IT support personnel to monitor their business applications, RTO Software has developed RTO PinPoint, an Application Performance Monitoring product that goes beyond the network for performance information.
RTO PinPoint provides the IT department with valuable tools to monitor and facilitate optimization of mission-critical applications in any Windows server environment. Using agent-based monitoring techniques, RTO PinPoint gathers information from your server applications and transfers it through a sophisticated Analysis Engine to display on the RTO PinPoint Console. This overview of your business-critical server applications presents answers to your performance questions about:
Citrix Metaframe and
Terminal Servers
.NET Web applications
IIS servers
COM+ application servers
Page and file servers
Unlike infrastructure monitors that only tell you if your servers are up or down, RTO PinPoint provides alerts along with a detailed root cause analysis telling you why an application isn't performing well. It alerts management when the business is suffering, and it can save administrators from unnecessary alerts.
The RTO PinPoint Console simplifies application management and troubleshooting, by providing real-time monitoring of application performance and availability. RTO PinPoint focuses on application performance, by identifying performance issues, pointing to resources that cause performance degradation and reporting the root cause so that corrective action can be taken. Importantly, RTO PinPoint provides detailed historical trending information about when and why your applications are not performing as expected. PinPoint also indicates when the problem is urgent and needs immediate attention, or is less important and not likely to impact critical business processes due to any number of factors. Alerts are generated for critical issues and the administrator is notified of the problem.
Pinpoint makes it easy to review application performance with PinPoint Replay. With this new feature, historical events or alerts can be investigated. Simply click on the 'Replay' link on any alert, and you are replaying exactly the moment of the alert. This allows a more detailed analysis and investigation of root causes. With Replay, you can go back in time to see application performance issues as they develop. Replay alerts, or any time – for any server, any application being monitored by Pinpoint.
Why RTO PinPoint?
Typically, an enterprise application provides services to a large number of users over a network. These software applications are hosted on application servers which are often spread across the network. Types of applications include database programs, word processors, and spreadsheets and financial programs, communications. Although word processors and spreadsheet programs are commonly stand-alone programs residing on an individual user’s desktop, any application that requires sharing can be hosted on a server, enabling access (and file sharing) by several users.
The infrastructure that supports the applications consists of the hardware, network, system and server software (e.g. compliers, debuggers, utilities, operating system, etc.). In order to monitor the health of infrastructure components, systems management tools have been developed. These tools include network management (bandwidth statistics, network status, etc), hardware and software management (physical location and inventory of hardware, distribution of software, etc), debuggers for developers (finding problems in code), response-time tools, server management tools (that monitor the status of a server). Although helpful, there are problems that these tools can’t solve. Traditional network management systems can’t always see parts of a modern enterprise network. Device-based management tools (hardware/server software) don’t offer data that corresponds to business relevance. And because management systems are often particular to only one system component, when the source of a problem can’t be found within that component, finger pointing occurs and the solution to the problem may never be found, much less implemented.
For example, for .NET applications most monitoring solutions do not enable business users to identify and monitor all components related to the application. Because of this, relevant metrics pertaining to the application are not captured in context and as a result problem diagnosis becomes difficult, if not impossible for large distributed applications. In response to this problem, RTO PinPoint allows businesses to designate and capture pertinent metrics. RTO PinPoint uses low impact monitoring techniques, bolstered by our unique application providers that go deep into the system or a class of applications. The RTO PinPoint Console monitors your applications in real time, determining your applications’ performance. From easy-to-understand graphic presentations of Performance Score, Resource Utilization and Business Score, managers will learn specifically where performance issues originate-in an application or at the server level-as well as the likely extent of the problem. With this informative alert of the root cause and advance knowledge of how much a negative event will affect business processes, your staff can react appropriately to minimize impact on the bottom line.
RTO PinPoint Key Features
Real Time Monitoring of application performance and reliability
End to End monitoring for User
Experience measurements
Real Time Analysis of root cause
Robust Root Cause Analysis reporting
Replay historical performance monitoring.
Pause
real time measurements.
Application vs. infrastructure analysis
Alerts based upon dynamic thresholds
Historical drill down and Reporting
Easy installation with immediate results
Integration with leading infrastructure monitors
Perhaps you already have a systems management tool installed in your enterprise. RTO PinPoint seamlessly integrates with other system management tools, and greatly enhances your management capabilities (and your investment in these tools), thus reducing the cost and complexity. Because RTO Software provides application-focused performance monitoring tools, we help companies increase the effectiveness of business-critical applications to enable greater business consistency, protect financial performance, and facilitate customer satisfaction (not ours, yours).
With PinPoint Replay, even if you use other systems management tool, you are protected from the "I had a problem last Tuesday" phone call. Use RTO Pinpoint with Replay as an insurance policy that you will always be able to go back and investigate such problems. Simply replay Tuesday.
Basic Topology
Agents
RTO PinPoint intelligent agents provide unique, often business critical, data required for the management of applications and the infrastructure supporting them. RTO PinPoint employs agents to probe and monitor server and application performance. These agents require a minimal footprint on the server, and together with agent-less monitoring, can go deep into the system or application to ensure that your business can quickly respond to any problems. RTO PinPoint deploys the following information providers (as part of the agents):
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ASP.Net
Transaction Provider, COM+ Transaction Provider |
Provides detailed information about your ASP.NET and COM+ transactions specifically used for your applications
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Citrix Published Application Provider |
Provides detailed information about your Citrix based published application, providing you with unique data about your applications such as login time, application load, and application performance beyond your Citrix environment.
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CPU Abuse Provider |
Identifies processes by user that are consuming an unfair amount of CPU processing time
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Windows Server Provider |
Provides crucial information about the performance of your Windows server including running services, average CPU utilization, and average memory utilization. |
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Application and User Instance Provider |
Informs you which instance and user is causing a performance problem (on terminal servers)
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SQL Server Provider |
Monitors detailed performance and configuration statistics for MS SQL server
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With these intelligent agents, RTO PinPoint can get information to you when you need it, not just when you want it. In addition to gathering metric data, RTO PinPoint can send alerts to notify you when a system is experiencing problems: real-time data for your real-time business.
The Console
The RTO PinPoint Console shows performance information about applications you are monitoring. The console shows various views of this performance information and allows you to ‘drill down’ into details about the application, the server or the metric you are interested. The console also alerts you when performance is deteriorating and provides a root cause analysis report for supporting detail. The console monitors the application performance, the resources used. It allows you to drill into specific alerts or servers to further understand the root cause of performance issues. The console shows different views including listing all your applications, selected applications, specific servers, specific metrics, and topology views.
Once the application is created, the console configures the Analysis Engine with the profile and metrics for your application. The Application Performance Summary View shows each defined application and the Application Performance Score. The application performance score is a composite of measurements indicating the applications’ performance. The Resource Utilization score is a composite of measurements indicating the resource load of the application. You use these two scores to know how your application is performing.
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Application
Performance View |
Key Features
Key Benefits
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Server
Performance View |
Key Features
Key Benefits
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History
and Trend Analysis |
Key Features
Key Benefits
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Alerts
The ability to manage and receive alerts regarding distributed applications distinguishes RTO PinPoint from other monitoring tools. Because business users and administrators need real-time information, wherever they might be, RTO PinPoint can be configured to send alerts in one or several formats. Alerts can be communicated via pager, email, RCA, systems management tools, etc.
And because business needs differ from application to application, RTO PinPoint allows for both RTO PinPoint generated alerts, and user-designated alerts. In the first case, RTO PinPoint will generate an RCA (Root Cause Analysis) any time there is an Application Performance Alert as determined by the intelligent defaults integrated into RTO PinPoint. If the user stipulates that an alert should be generated when a specific metric is reached, a Metric Performance Alert will occur.
The RTO PinPoint Console alerts are based on dynamic thresholds and offer historical drill-down information. They are supported by custom providers and unique data correlations that go deep into the system or class of applications for the right information. Our application monitoring solution also integrates with your existing alert management systems, such as Microsoft/MOM, IBM/Tivoli, Hewlett-Packard/OpenView and other similar systems, enhancing your investment in these products.
Root Cause Analysis Reports
Real-time data gathered by RTO PinPoint is retained over time and offers valuable insight into when and why application performance was hampered. Historic trend analysis of important throughput and utilization metrics leads to understanding of application versus infrastructure problems. This objective review of performance can suggest corrective measures and help align your company's business and technology strategies and objectives. RTO PinPoint generates Root Cause Analysis (RCA) Reports when the performance metrics fall below pre-defined thresholds set to trigger an Application Performance Alert. RCA Reports are text-based and are in addition to APA alerts being shown on the console and/or alerts being communicated via email, pager, etc.
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Root Cause Analysis
Report |
Key Features
Key Benefits
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Pre-requisites
Licensing
Any server agent requires a license key, purchased from RTO Software in order to operate RTO PinPoint beyond the evaluation period.
Configuration overview
RTO PinPoint is installed on a Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 server. This server acts as a console, analysis engine, and data collection source. The RTO PinPoint Console Server should be reasonably high performing with:
RAM:
512 Mb minimum,
CPU:
1 Ghz minimum,
Available
Disk Space: 20 Gig
On each monitored server, RTO PinPoint requires an agent be installed. RTO PinPoint automatically deploys the agent, and once installed it automatically begins monitoring your servers. The agent can easily be uninstalled. No reboot is necessary to install or remove the agents. The Agents use WMI to inspect the infrastructure on the installed server and uses WMI and DCOM for communication. WMI is preinstalled in Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, Windows Me, and Windows 2000. It is rare to disable WMI and DCOM on these Windows servers; if these services are disabled, contact RTO.
Pre-requisites for the RTO PinPoint Server
RTO PinPoint is installed on a server that can
communicate with your application servers and other infrastructure components.
This server receives metrics from your application servers via WMI, a protocol
used to communicate asset and other status information from Windows
servers. For any application, RTO PinPoint requires administrative access
to the servers (user login, etc) and WMI ports open.
The installation starts with the RTO PinPoint server; then, the RTO
PinPoint agents must be installed on the servers you wish to monitor. Two MSI
files are provided for your installation: ‘Console.msi’ installs the RTO
PinPoint Server Console and ‘Agent.msi’ which
installs the RTO PinPoint agent.
An Administrative Account is required that has administrative-rights
access to the machine selected for the RTO PinPoint installation.
Adjusting metrics and scores
In order to monitor the performance of an application, two important scores are generated: the application performance score and the resource utilization score. The application performance score is a base 100 score made up of a composite of measurements indicating the application’s performance. The resource utilization score, also base 100 score, is a composite of measurements indicating the resource load of the application such as CPU % memory utilization and page performance.
These scores are derived from metrics collected per intelligent defaults supplied by RTO PinPoint and each metric shown on any screen is configurable. You can configure the metric text, the alert conditions for the metric, and thresholds. Both server and application metrics can be configured. Servers can be identified as critical resources, and performance scores for the application will reflect that status of any critical server (for example, if a critical server is down, the application is shown as being down).
Possible server metrics are average response time, maximum and minimum response time, transactions aborted, transactions committed, transactions in progress, and transactions per second. Specific components for your applications can be monitored. Examples include IOMGR.EXE, IISsrv.exe, logon.scr, mad.exe, etc. when you configure the metrics, you will supply the metrics name, the application and server information, the threshold levels, descriptions of the metric, the metric category, and related metrics.
Who should install
The installation process for RTO PinPoint is very simple and straightforward. Therefore, anyone with administrator rights on the server can install this product. However, you may want to have the person responsible for monitoring the application assist with the installation, in order to help with the configuration process and familiarize him/herself with the product.