Monitoring Application Services

Evaluating application services

You can monitor your applications for health issues and active alerts to mitigate potential impact on the application services. Evaluating application service data provides insights, based on its service type. If you identify an issue with your services you can edit your application service.

For more information about editing application configuration, see Use BIG-IQ to Manage Applications, or Use BIG-IQ to Manage AS3 templates.

For more information about minimum requirements for statistics visibility, see Configuring Statistics Collection.

Traffic Management

Local traffic data provides analytics into the latency of the end-to-end HTTP transactions between the client and server. Using HTTP data, you can identify:

• Trends in application traffic

• Issues affecting the application’s servers (pool members)

• Issues affecting virtual servers

• Client-reported latency

Devices

Device data provides analytics into the resource usage and traffic to your BIG-IP environment. Using this data, you can identify:

• Device resource usage and status (CPU, memory, etc.)
• Traffic throughput over time

Security

Web application security data and alerts provide indications of the application service’s protection and the malicious traffic detected by your protection profiles. Using traffic data detected by security policies you can identify:

• General trends in potential security threats

• False positives generated by a policy that is actively blocking traffic

• Attacks that reached your application servers when a policy is in monitoring (transparent) protection

DNS

DNS services report the query responses per second (RPS) and the outcomes of DNS traffic. Using data from traffic within your DNS domain you can identify:

• Trends in DNS traffic

• Results of DNS load balancing decisions

Note: DNS will always have a health status of Other, and do not represent the health status of the application. You can monitor DNS domain traffic to verify that an application service is performing as expected.

Identify applications with health issues

You can use the application health status settings to identify a specific application that has surpassed an application service performance threshold.

Note: Application health is based on HTTP traffic data and BIG-IP resource usage. DNS services are not included in the application’s health status.

1. Open the application summary screen (Applications > APPLICATIONS).

2. Locate the HEALTH area at the top left of the summary bar.

3. Click Critical and Moderate to filter the application list by applications with the selected health statuses.

   Note: In the applications list, the Active Alerts field indicates the current number of alerts for an application.

4. Click the application’s name.

   The application services are displayed.

5. Identify the application services with moderate or critical health, and click the name to view the summary dashboard for the selected application service.

You can use the ANALYTICS portion of the application service dashboard to evaluate charts that contain traffic data specific to the selected HTTP application service.

Application service traffic management charts

This table lists and defines the charts found under the ANALYTICS tab in the application service dashboard (Applications > APPLICATIONS > <Application Name> > <Application HTTP Service>). Select one of the options marked in the image to view charts at the bottom of the screen. These charts display the trends of traffic processed by the BIG-IP system. Each chart displays an aspect of application service traffic as a function of the selected time period.

Application service environment charts

This table describes the menu options and charts found in the application service dashboard (Applications > APPLICATIONS > <Application Name> > <Application HTTP Service). Select the option marked in the image to view charts at the bottom of the screen. These charts display the trends of the host BIG-IP device, or service scaling group. Each chart displays an aspect of the devices as a function of the selected time period.

Application service client traffic charts

This table lists and defines the charts found under the ANALYTICS tab in the application service dashboard (Applications > APPLICATIONS > <Application Name> > <Application HTTP Service>). Select the option marked in the image to view charts at the bottom of the screen. These charts display the trends of application traffic processed by the BIG-IP system. Each chart displays an aspect of application traffic as a function of the selected time period.

Application service security charts

This table lists and defines the charts found under the ANALYTICS tab in the application service dashboard (Applications > APPLICATIONS > <Application Name> > <Application HTTP Service>). Select the option marked in the image to view charts at the bottom of the screen. These charts display the trends of the application service’s traffic processed by a Web Application Security policy. Each chart displays an aspect of traffic as a function of the selected time period.

Monitor application performance using alerts

About application health alerts

Application health alerts are based on traffic data, or surpassed thresholds, reported by application services. Active alerts reflect an application service performance issue. A critical or warning alert that is active indicates that there has been a sustained threshold violation for over five minutes.

A metric threshold violation must be sustained for 5 minutes to trigger an alert. A subsequent alert is triggered once another threshold is crossed (either an increase or decrease in severity, or cleared). To ensure that conditions are improving, an alert for declining severity (critical to warning) or a cleared alert, is triggered only when the value is sustained for five minutes at ten percent below the threshold value. For example, if a threshold value is configured for greater than 60 percent, a declining severity must be sustained at 54 percent or less to trigger an alert.

If the performance indicator or threshold does not reflect your application service’s performance, you can customize the alert rule settings. (Click the health icon at the top left of the application screen.) The application health is defined in the application template.

Identify applications with health issues

You can use the application health status settings to identify a specific application that has surpassed an application service performance threshold.

Note: Application health is based on HTTP traffic data and BIG-IP resource usage. DNS services are not included in the application’s health status.

1. Open the application summary screen (Applications > APPLICATIONS).

2. Locate the HEALTH area at the top left of the summary bar.

3. Click Critical and Moderate to filter the application list by applications with the selected health statuses.

   Note: In the applications list, the Active Alerts field indicates the current number of alerts for an application.

4. Click the application’s name.

   The application services are displayed.

5. Identify the application services with moderate or critical health, and click the name to view the summary dashboard for the selected application service.

You can use the ANALYTICS portion of the application service dashboard to evaluate charts that contain traffic data specific to the selected HTTP application service.

Identify the performance issues impacting an application’s health

You can use the application alerts from the single application screen to identify when a performance issue began. You can then use the application’s transaction to evaluate how the issue is currently affecting your application’s health.

1. Open the application properties screen by selecting the application’s name from the Applications screen ( click Applications > APPLICATIONS > <Application Name> > <Application HTTP Service>).

2. To view the application’s most severe, active alerts, view the Active Alerts area at the far right of the summary bar.

3. Click See All to view the application’s Active Alert screen.

   This displays a log of all alerts that have crossed a defined threshold.

4. Click the row for the most recent health alert, and view the alert details on the lower part of the screen.

   • The Description field displays the affected performance indicator.
   • The Value field displays the value when the alert was triggered
   • The Log Level filed indicate the alert’s severity.

5. Return to the single application screen by clicking the back arrow next to Active Alerts screen title.

From the application screen, you can use the alert information to analyze and isolate if the issue is related to one or more pool members.

Modify Application Performance Monitoring Alerts

Application service alerts

Application service alerts notify regarding changes in application service metrics that can affect the overall performance of traffic or security management. You can view alerts from the single application service screen (Applications > APPLICATIONS > <Application Name> > <Application HTTP Service>), or the alerts screens (Applications > ALERT MANAGEMENT > Active Alerts or Alert History).

Managing application traffic monitoring settings

The health of your application service is determined by metric thresholds that monitor your application’s traffic processing capabilities. Each metric provides information about latency of your application’s pool members, latency of the BIG-IP system, total number of connections, and transaction outcomes. These metrics and corresponding thresholds use a default application health alert rule set. You can modify the default rule set for all applications, or add a new alert rule for a single application.

Tip: You can view and edit a single application service’s health rules by clicking the health icon located at the far left of the single application service’s summary bar.

Modify the default application alerts

You can monitor your applications service’s health status based on the status of its connected objects and traffic performance metrics. The health alerts rules for your application can be adjusted based on your monitoring needs.

1. Go to the Alert Management screen Applications > ALERT MANAGEMENT > Alert Rules.

2. Click the alert rule name.

   This opens the alert rule’s properties screen.

3. View the Metric Conditions area at the center of the screen, which displays the current metrics and thresholds for the default application alerts rule.

   By default, all the metrics are enabled.

   Note: BIG-IP devices earlier than version 13.1.0.5 do not collect data that supports metric alerts. Applications that are managed by earlier versions of a BIG-IP device do not receive metric alerts.

4. To disable metrics, clear the check box to the right of the metric column.

   This stops any device alerts for this metric.

5. To adjust the Warning and Critical threshold values for enabled metrics, specify a different value for the metric in the appropriate fields.

6. In the Events area, you can enable or disable status alerts for application objects.

7. Use the Actions area to enable alert notifications by SNMP and Email.

8. Click Save at the bottom of the screen, or click Save & Close to save and return to the Alert Rules screen.

The health and metric rules trigger new alerts according to the saved modifications. This clears active alerts associated with this rule set, and triggers an Alert Rule Changes alert.

Add a new health rule set for an application service

When you configure an application service to the BIG-IQ, the application and its services are monitored by a default health alert rule set. You can create a new health alert rule set to customize the alert notifications for a specific application service.

1. Go to the Alert Management screen Applications > ALERT MANAGEMENT > Alert Rules.

2. At the top left of the screen, click the Add button.

   The New Alert Rule screen opens.

3. Type aName and an optional Description.

4. Select the Rule Type (Device Health or Device Access-health).

5. In the Metric Conditions area, enable and disable metrics as needed by selecting or clearing the box to the right of the Metric column.

   Note: BIG-IP devices earlier than version 13.1.0.5 do not collect data that supports metric alerts. Applications that are managed by earlier versions of a BIG-IP device do not receive metric alerts.

6. Use the Actions area to enable alert notifications by SNMP and Email.

7. Use the Devices area at the bottom of the screen to view the available devices for the new alert rule set, and move a device from the Available list to the Selected list.

   You can filter the device lists by selecting from the Filter list.

8. Click Save at the bottom of the screen, or click Save & Close to save and return to the Alert Rules screen.

The health and metric rules trigger new alerts according to the saved modifications. This clears active alerts for the associated application, which triggers the Alert Rule Changes alert.

Application service health alerts

The device health alerts notify you of changes in your application traffic that impact the health of the application. When there is a threshold violation for application traffic thresholds, the application health status changes. You can view application alerts from the single application screen (Applications > APPLICATIONS > <Application Name>), or the alerts screens (Applications > ALERT MANAGEMENT > Active Alerts or Alert History).

Identifying Server Issues that Require Mitigation

Detecting application performance issues that require mitigation

An application’s performance issues might be caused by changes in a pool member’s status. Issues with a pool member can lead to increases in application response time, server-side round trip time (RTT), incomplete transactions, and server errors. An application that sustains these increases can result in a critical or moderate health status. You can use application alerts to isolate managed objects, such as pool members, or virtual servers that reported issues. You can use your findings to adjust your application’s managed objects (LTM pool members) in order to improve performance.

You identify an application with changes in pool member status by using the application health status screen (Applications > APPLICATONS). Once an application is identified (Applications > APPLICATONS > <Application Name>), you can identify which pool member(s) is affecting performance.

Identify pool members causing traffic performance issues

You can isolate pool members that are causing performance issues to mitigate the performance impact on your application service.

1. Open the application properties screen by selecting the application’s name from the Applications screen ( click Applications > APPLICATIONS > <Application Name> > <Application HTTP Service>).

2. Near the middle of the screen in the SERVERS area, click the numbered icon below to display pool member information in the ANALYTICS area.

   

3. To view pool member traffic data, select from menu to the left of the screen in the ANALYTICS area (Server Latency, Application Response Time, or Server Side RTT).

4. In the time settings above the chart, ensure that the Events button is set to ON.

5. You can click the Category buttons below the chart such that only the System button is active.

   Note: The buttons below the chart have a gray background when disabled, and a blue background, when enabled.

   This action filters out all other alert and event categories displayed in the charts.

6. Click an event icon in the chart to display the events and alerts that correspond with the traffic data.

   This displays the event table below the chart, which includes details about the events and alerts that occurred at that time.

   Tip: You can further filter so that only pool member and virtual server events appear, use the Search events field, and type “server-readiness”.

7. Isolate the affected pool member address from the Title column in the event table, or click the event row to view event details in the Description area.

8. You can analyze additional data for the isolated pool member by expanding the Dimension pane to the right of the chart and selecting the pool member address from the Pool Members Address list.

Application service server charts

This table lists and defines the charts found under the ANALYTICS tab in the application service dashboard (Applications > APPLICATIONS > <Application Name> > <Application HTTP Service>). Select the option marked in the image to view charts at the bottom of the screen. These charts display the trends of the application pool members. Each chart displays an aspect of pool member performance, as function of the selected time period.

Pool member status events

Pool member events and alerts indicate the status of a pool member. You can see these events and alerts in the charts of the application properties screen (Applications > APPLICATIONS > <Application Name> > <Application HTTP Service>) and in the Local Traffic dashboards (Monitoring > DASHBOARDS > Local Traffic). You can also view alerts in the Active Alerts and Alert History screens (Applications > ALERT MANAGEMENT).

Virtual server status events

Virtual Server events and indicate the status of the virtual server and its pool. You can see these events and alerts in the charts of the application properties screen ( Applications > APPLICATIONS > <Application Name> > <Application HTTP Service>) and in the Local Traffic dashboards ( Monitoring > DASHBOARDS > Local Traffic). You can also view alerts in the Active Alerts and Alert History screens (Applications > ALERT MANAGEMENT).

Mitigating a traffic performance issue

To manage LTM objects to mitigate a performance issue that you isolated using analytics, you use essentially the same screens that you used to find the problem. But instead of using the ANALYTICS option in the details area, you use the CONFIGURATION option.

The workflow for resolving the issue is essentially the same, regardless of what kind of object is triggering the issue.

• Create a replacement for the object triggering the issue.
• Delete or remove the object from service.

In these tasks, we provide an example of a problem pool member. But you can use essentially the same strategy for other LTM object types in your application.

Create a replacement pool member

When you isolate a pool member that is affecting traffic performance, you can create a replacement for the member that is triggering the performance issues.

1. Select the application that needs attention from the all applications screen (Applications > APPLICATIONS > Application Name).

2. Find the pool member that needs attention: At the right, center of the screen, click the number in the Servers circle.

   This displays the pool member information in the CONFIGURATION area.

3. Create a new pool member.

   1. At the left click CONFIGURATION.

   2. Under Servers, click Create (a Create Servers popup screen opens).

   3. Type the IP Address and Port for the new pool member.

   4. Click Create. (This creates the pool member and closes the popup screen.)

The next thing you probably want to do is take this pool member out of service so that your application traffic can return to normal.

Solve a performance problem stemming from pool member issues

Before you start, you probably want to create a replacement pool member to handle the traffic of the problem member.

When you isolate a pool member that is affecting traffic performance, you have a couple of ways to remedy the issue. Depending on what kind of issues the pool member is experiencing, you might want to delete it immediately, disable it, or force it offline.

1. Select the application that needs attention from the all applications screen (Applications > APPLICATIONS > Application Name).

2. Find the pool member that needs attention: At the right, center of the screen, click the number in the Servers circle.

   This displays the pool member information in the CONFIGURATION area.

3. Select the pool member that needs attention:

   1. Click CONFIGURATION.

   2. Select the check box for the pool member.

4. Determine what you want to do with this pool member based on the nature of the performance issue, and take the most appropriate action.

The next thing you probably want to do is repeat the troubleshooting steps you used to isolate this pool member as the problem source and confirm that the issue is resolved.

Collecting Additional Data to Troubleshoot Application Service Performance

Collect additional data to troubleshoot an application’s performance

You can use the Analytics area of the Application screen to collect additional data about application traffic data. This prompts the system to collect additional metrics about your application’s performance, which enhances your troubleshooting capabilities.

Tip: You can enable Enhanced Analytics on multiple applications at once to the enhanced data objects in the HTTP dashboard (click Monitoring > DASHBOARDS > Local Traffic > HTTP).

1. Open the application properties screen by selecting the application’s name from the Applications screen ( click Applications > APPLICATIONS > <Application Name> > <Application HTTP Service>).

2. Click the Enhanced Analytics button to Enhanced Analytics Settings popup screen.

   Note: By default, all HTTP metrics (check boxes) are enabled (selected). Selecting only one, or a focused number of metrics, improves the quality of the data collected.

3. Ensure that the Collect HTTP metrics for <Application Name> check box is selected.

4. Leave selected only the check boxes you want, to view specific data within the chart dimensions of the Analytics area.

5. To view details about your application’s security, select Collect Security metrics for all devices hosting <Application Name>.

6. Click Start.

   The detail screen for this application displays a banner across the top of the screen, Enhanced Analytics On, with a Stop button. If you return to the Applications screen, the health icon in the applications list is highlighted to indicate which application is running Enhanced Analytics.

7. To disable Enhanced Analytics, click the Stop button in the Enhanced Analytics On banner.

   Tip: You can also click Enhanced Analytics, and click Stop in the Enhanced Analytics Settings popup window.

   Important: Once you have completed troubleshooting, disable Enhanced Analytics to reduce disk usage allocated for statistics data collection.

When Enhanced Analytics mode is off, dimension statistics persist in the dimension object list, when viewing a time period from when Enhanced Analytics was enabled.

HTTP metrics provided in Enhanced Analytics settings

This table lists and describes HTTP options in the Enhanced Analytics Settings popup screen displays additional metric data for the corresponding dimensions, when enabled. The added data is displayed in the HTTP traffic charts. When disabled, these dimensions display aggregated data.

Identifying additional application security and traffic parameters

When you are troubleshooting the security status of an application, additional data can help you isolate details that characterize potential, or ongoing, vulnerabilities. On the Application screen, the Enhanced Analytics option provides you with the ability to collect more information about the Web Application Security policy for your application’s BIG-IP host device. When this feature is enabled, the enhanced data displays additional dimension objects and data for the security dimensions found in the Analytics area.

In addition to displaying enhanced traffic data, you can select additional HTTP traffic data to view details about the application’s traffic during the time of an attack (for example, Client IPs, Geolocations, or URLs).

The Enhanced Analytics option does not impact your BIG-IQ system performance. By default,you can enable up to 20 applications simultaneously in Enhanced Analytics mode.

Note: System administrators can adjust the maximum number of applications by modifying the maxNumberOfApps parameter value in the /var/config/rest/config/restjavad.properties.json file.

Security metrics collected in Enhanced Analytics settings

This table lists and describes the security dimensions that can display additional metric data, when Collect Security metrics for all devices hosting <Application Name> is selected in the Enhanced Analytics Settings popup screen. When Enhanced Analytics is enabled, the added data is displayed in the Web Application Security charts. When disabled, these dimensions display aggregated data in the dimension object list.

Monitoring DNS application service data

DNS load balances global resources to control and distribute application traffic according to your policies. Monitoring DNS application service data allows you to evaluate how your DNS configuration manages traffic. You can use the charts to evaluate the DNS application service to your application’s GSLB domain.

To view DNS traffic data, go to Applications > APPLICATIONS > <Application Name> > <DNS Application Service>. From the DNS application service’s dashboard, select the FQDN (domain name) option at the center of the screen. Ensure you are on the ANALYTICS tab, to view data. For more information about editing your DNS service properties or GSLB configuration, see Managing DNS and DNS GSLB objects using BIG-IQ.

DNS Application service charts

This table describes the menu options and charts found in the DNS application service dashboard (Applications > APPLICATIONS > <Application Name> > <DNS Application Service>). Select the option marked in the image to view charts at the bottom of the screen. These charts display the trends of DNS traffic within your application’s domain.