Viewing and Investigating Alerts for .NET Applications (Server-side Perspective)

To view and investigate alerts for .NET applications (server-side example)

1. To view active alerts by application group, in the System Center 2012 – Operations Manager console, in the navigation pane, click the Monitoring button, expand Application Monitoring, expand .NET Monitoring, expand the folder with the name of the application group you configured for monitoring, and then click Active Alerts.

   View alerts by application group

   

   Additional views:

   - To see why a monitoring aspect is unhealthy, use the application group state view and click the state view cell related to it. The Details View will show you the instance and the state of the Availability, Configuration, Performance, and Security monitors. You can also start the Health Explorer in context of the application instance to see which monitors have gone into a critical or warning state.
   
     **Application group state view**
   
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     ![Application group state view](images/Hh431846.b7ddecd7-3f51-447c-8a7c-90cc53ce1152(SC.12).jpeg "Application group state view")
   
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   - To see application performance, in the application component folder, click **All Performance Data**. This gives you the base information about each component, shown by instance.
   
     **All performance data**
   
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     ![All Performance Data view](images/Hh431846.a686904a-eac0-48a5-b168-ad5fadeb3665(SC.12).jpeg "All Performance Data view")
   
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   - To see the overall health dashboard view of the components you selected for the application you are monitoring, in the application component folder, click **Overall Component Health**. You will see the application state, active alerts, and a detail view.
   
     **Overall component health**
   
     <div class="inset">
   
     ![Overall Component Health](images/Hh431846.552c9aaf-9880-4cbf-9efa-e676f0182e7c(SC.12).jpeg "Overall Component Health")
   
     </div>
   

   To work with data collected by client-side monitoring, in the Operations Manager console, in the navigation pane, click the Monitoring button, expand Application Monitoring, expand .NET Monitoring, and then application name (client) folder. The client-side monitoring process is very similar to server-side monitoring, except that you click All Performance Data and Overall Component Health in the application name (client) folder to view alerts pertaining to the client-side monitoring for the application group.

   To make sure client-side application monitoring is working, go to the application group state view and the CSM Application Component will have application monitoring status filled in.

   Note

   Client-side monitoring is an extension of server-side monitoring that is not enabled by default. You set it up through the same template as server-side monitoring. It might take a few minutes to discover the objects after you set up client-side monitoring.

2. To see general details about an alert, click an alert. The Alert Details pane describes the alert, including information about its source, rule, creation date, and the monitoring setting that caused the alert to be raised.

3. To begin investigating an alert and view the alert description, double-click an alert. The Alert Properties page will open.

   Begin investigating alerts on the Alert Properties page

   

   Note

   To see details about an alert in any of these views, click the alert you want to investigate and look in the Alert Details pane for the Knowledge section. You can also open the Alert Properties page, which shows the details of an alert and you can enter alert status. To open the Alert Properties page, double-click an alert or in the Tasks pane, in the Tasks section, click Alert Properties.

4. On the Alert Properties page, click the link in the Alert Description pane. This opens Application Diagnostics, a new monitoring feature in Operations Manager in a web browser. Here on the Event properties tab you can see information, such as the performance metrics, the call stack, and collection notes. For more information on the Event properties tab, see Performance Event Details. Click Yes to close the main window once the event information has loaded.

   Note

   This link to Application Diagnostics is also on the Alert Context tab.

5. Application Diagnostics Event properties

   

6. On the Event Properties tab, expand the Stack section. The stack is the order in which events happened. The Resource Group View and Execution Tree View allow you to expand nodes to investigate the various calls. This view helps answer which tier the problem is in, or where is it occurring.

   Application Diagnostics tree views lets you see exactly what went wrong where and when.

   

7. To see how this event relates to other events in the chain of events, on the Application Diagnostics page, click the Distributed chains tab. This view shows all of the components that are involved in the request.

   Application Diagnostics Distributed chains show how events relate to each other.

   

8. To pinpoint the root cause of the problem or incident, click the last event in the chain. This is the latest event that broke the performance threshold. The Event Properties tab for that event will open.

9. On the Application Diagnostics page, click the Performance counters tab. Performance counters show the system 15 minutes before the event happened. This gives a baseline measure before the event, which allows you to see your system state before the event so that you know if the system was impacting the performance of the application.

   Application Diagnostics Performance counters allow you to compare system performance before, during, and after an event.

   

10. On the Application Diagnostics page, click the Similar events tab. Similar events are the other events that are in the same problem group. On this page you can filter similar events by Problem and Heaviest Resource to help you identify trends.

    Application Diagnostics Similar events allow you to compare similar events to identify trends.

    

11. On the Application Diagnostics page, click the Related events tab. Related events are events that occurred around the same time as the event you are investigating. Related events tell you what else is going on about the same time as the event you are investigating. You can increase or decrease the range of time in which other related events occurred relative to the event you are investigating. In general, specifying a greater time range shows you more related events.

    Application Diagnostics Related events allows you to see what other events are occurring about the same time as the event you are investigating.