The comprehensive monitoring and alerting of IT infrastructures is a precondition for the availability of critical applications such as CRM, ERP and e-mail servers. If a company has a large number of competitors, and operates in an industry where steady progress is the key to success, there is an increased need for monitoring and alerting of key applications. Not to mention anyone seeking that coveted 99.999% up time.

Graphdat, the real-time application performance monitoring provider launched last year, introduces Smart Alarms–a system that provides real time and historical data in one interface. It offers developers a comprehensive, enterprise-wide solution for the central management of performance and availability of servers, hardware, operating systems and applications.

The company has run the tagline “every dev deserves a heartrate monitor for their apps” to explain the product and from our examination, that’s exactly what Graphdat supplies.

As important as development of software, is the maintenance and awareness of how that software is operating on hardware. Companies like Graphdat provide these sorts of solutions so it’s worth looking into what exists on the market. So, what made Graphdat catch our eye? The monitoring concept of “smart alarms” is a good place to start.

How it Works?

The Smart Alarms system automates the seamless monitoring of critical servers, for all Windows systems and non-Windows systems such as Mac, Ubuntu, Debian, Redhat and CentOS. First you need to create an account with Graphdat and then install the agent on your server. The agent gives access to real time server performance for CPU, memory, disk and network metrics.

The next step is to install the plugin on the server. The web server plugin contributes access to real time application request counts and response time. The add Graphdat into the application code base and Keep a close eye on system with Smart Alarms.

Smart Alarms can be customized to get metrics data from CPU usage, memory, disk bytes read and write, network bytes read and write, application request count and application response time. What sets apart Graphdat alarms is that you can not only alarm basic aggregates like min, max, count but you can also alarm for an average.

The time period to set alarm can range from 1 second up to 12 hours. For example as per Graphdat documentation, if you set a CPU threshold of, say, avg > 80% and a period of 1 minute then this translate to: “Tell me when my CPU average is above 80% for at least 1 minute.”

By default, the alarm is set for all servers, but you can choose which servers you wish to alarm. The smart alarm then provides dynamic and intelligent graphs and reports summarize a lot of information of your systems and applications. You can click on the graph to see a legend, drag around to see historical data, zoom out to see larger sections of time with the mouse wheel, and do much more.

SDK for Developers

As with all DevOps, developers themselves become an important organ for understanding the software product and producing the scripts and automation necessary to make monitoring function. As a result, Graphdat does not shirk their responsibility to provide a powerful way for Dev to grasp and extend their platform.

To make integration as easy as possible, Graphdat is compatible with all major operating systems; web servers including Apache, IIS, and Linux NGiNX; software stack (node.js, Microsoft .NET, php, python and ruby); and database (SQL server and MySQL).

The company provides an SDK that when installed will talk to the agent, who then sends everything to your graphs as a single package such as server metrics and code metrics. The SDK lets developers set alarms, alerts, adding meta data to graphs, plus Python, Ruby and Java support as well as mobile application performance management.