Category: Performance Metric of the Month
TCP: Where the Network Meets the Application, Part 1
This post is written by Eric Thomas, Principal Solutions Architect at ExtraHop Networks. Many organizations struggle to find the right level of instrumentation to monitor the performance of their business-critical applications. It’s often a compromise: on one hand, you expect a certain level of detail or granularity, and on the other, you know that you [...]
Performance Metric of the Month: Packet Loss, Retransmission Timeouts (RTOs) and Round-Trip Times in Virtualized Systems
Retransmission timeout and round-trip time metrics can reveal virtual packet loss. This month’s Performance Metric turns to retransmission timeouts (RTOs) and round-trip times, particularly for transactions travelling to virtualized systems. Both high RTOs and high levels of jitter on round-trip times in these instances likely indicate virtual packet loss, a hard-to-detect performance problem that plagues [...]
Performance Metric of the Month: CIFS Errors
CIFS Errors: The ExtraHop system provides storage performance details not contained in event logs. September’s Performance Metric of the Month (PMM) focuses on CIFS errors for networked storage, but applies equally to other storage networking protocols such as NFS and iSCSI. Previous PMMs included TCP retransmission timeouts or PAWS dropped SYNs. Storage is a hot topic [...]
Performance Metric of the Month: PAWS Dropped SYNs and Network Address Translation
In past blog posts, we’ve talked about performance metrics, such as TCP retransmission timeouts (RTOs) and database performance metrics, which help IT teams solve hard-to-pinpoint issues before they cause big problems. This month, we turn our attention to an especially tricky network performance metric: PAWS Dropped SYNs. One customer we worked with saw odd connection [...]
Application Performance Management (APM) + Database Activity Monitoring (DAM): It’s [Not] All About the Agents!
Adrian Lane, CTO of Securosis, recently wrote an article titled Database Monitoring Best Practices: Using DAM Tools for SearchSecurity.com. The article plays on a security angle but provides a nice opportunity to discuss the parallels of monitoring database performance. Lane notes, “The complexity of the relational [database] platform, coupled with multiple applications moving data in [...]
Performance Metric of the Month: Retransmission Timeouts (RTOs) and Application Performance Degradation
It’s a new year and a great time to make changes for the better. In an effort to rid the world of needless network and application performance slowdowns, we turn to retransmission timeouts (RTOs). What are they and what can you do about them? The ExtraHop system captures a lot of application performance metrics. One [...]