Layered Application Monitoring

This week Colin & Deb take a dive into the depths of layered application monitoring:  How to monitor your application when it depends on ancillary processes or servers to be fully functional.

This week finds them discussing 2 different posts that at first read seem considerably different from each other.  After working through the various ways each poster could approach their question, they turn out to have very similar application monitoring considerations that can be easily met by LTM’s built in monitoring capabilities and just a little bit more information about the applications in question.

The first post, a question about the best way to go about Monitoring a windows service from poster jondyke, inspired a couple of different approaches offered by hoolio & tammelaj.  (Thanks to both of you for your excellent suggestions.)

The second poster, gguy, asked how to Load balance only to one peer if another computer is down, namely how to mark a load balanced proxy server down when the application server it fronts is unavailable.  Since he posted in the iControl forum, Don offered an iControl solution (go figure! Thanks, Don).  Another alternative is to use LTM’s built in transparent monitoring feature.