Application Performance Monitor Frequently Asked Questions

   What happened to the old Application Monitor (AM) module?

   Application Monitor has reached its end-of-life and will no longer be sold. We will continue to support AM until February of 2009. AM’s replacement is Application Performance Monitor (APM), which includes all of the functionality of AM, plus new features that we think that you will find highly useful and valuable.

   Why are you licensing by monitors instead of by servers?

   Customers have told us that monitor-based pricing is much more flexible than server-based pricing. In the latter model, the cost for a server with a single important process is the same as a server with several applications comprising multiple processes, services, ports, and user-experience monitors. Monitor-based pricing provides a better correlation of price to value.

   What is a monitor?

   Four types of monitors are available in Application Performance Monitor: port monitors, user experience monitors, Windows service monitors, and process monitors. Every configured monitor for an application counts as a licensed monitor. For example, an APM AL50 can be configured for up to 50 monitors. 50 monitors might include the Windows services associated with SQL server, port monitors for a DNS or FTP server, user experience monitors for a web application, and processes running on a Linux server.

   Is APM closely integrated with Orion?

   Yes, APM leverages the same database, the same alerting engine, the same web console, and the same reporting infrastructure. In a single Orion view, users can see performance data about a server, the network interfaces connecting to that server, and the applications hosted by that server.

   How does APM collect data?

   Orion APM employs a highly-scalable, application-specific job engine that leverages scripts and multiple protocols, including WMI and SNMP.

   Is APM ready to meet the needs of large enterprises?

   Absolutely. Because Orion serves the full spectrum of corporations, from small/medium businesses to some of the largest enterprises in the world, APM was designed to fit into any of those environments. A single APM poller can handle thousands of monitors, but for those customers who need even more capacity, it's easy to scale through the provision of low-cost additional APM polling engines.