Monitor Response Time of Servers, Applications, and Databases

Response time monitoring can be crucial for your organization’s bottom line. Problems within a server, network, or data retrieval protocols can cause longer-than-normal response times and quickly derail end user experience. Performing response time analysis can help you more easily detect issues with your CPU load, storage, memory, and VM resources.

Aside from its effect on internal and external end user confidence, response time monitoring can help increase the efficiency of your application retrieval process. You can more easily maintain a good server response time when each step of your data retrieval operates with optimal efficiency, which can increase your overall productivity and function.

By continuously monitoring server response times, you improve your ability to identify issues within your system causing performance issues. You can also more easily detect server errors and quickly determine root causes of data delivery bottlenecks contributing to slowdown.

Comprehensive server response time monitoring is typically measured using a tool to collect and process response times at a granular level, allowing you to better determine what a sufficient server response time is for your requirements, what an unacceptable server response time is, and what part of your infrastructure may be contributing to potential bottlenecks. 

In each step of the response time monitoring process, a server response time monitoring tool can compare your server analytics to baseline response times to determine the deviation. If a high deviation exists, your response time monitoring software should provide alerts with timestamp details. These response time alerts can allow you to more easily respond and resolve the root cause of server response time issues while in warning and critical stages.

If you want to perform a server response time check, it’s helpful to understand the total response time is equal to the time it takes to process your end-user request in addition to the wait time for the end user to receive the queried data. 

So, to measure response time, you need to monitor the time elapsed at each point of communication throughout the data retrieval process. For different areas of server response time monitoring, you’ll be measuring slightly different processes. In network monitoring, for example, your network response time monitoring tool will time-check TCP handshakes. In application monitoring, to monitor response time you’ll be measuring the time to first byte. Application response time monitoring tools have the capacity to pinpoint the processes lagging within the involved data retrieval and network communication processes.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor allows for a high degree of specificity and scalability in server and application response time monitoring. SAM is built to provide automatic application discovery, offering the capability to identify and monitor using its 1200-plus unique application templates for the following environments:

• Windows
• Linux
• Active Directory
• Oracle
• Microsoft IIS
• Exchange Server
• MySQL Server
• Apache Web Server

SolarWinds SAM also lets you monitor response time for popular cloud-based services, including Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS), within the same dashboard view.

Server and application monitoring in SAM is designed to be an automatic process, using intuitive, color-coded graphics available on SAM’s centralized analytics platform. Built-in monitoring templates can allow you to toggle between different server monitoring statistics, so you can keep track of which aspects of a server need attention. You can also integrate SAM with SolarWinds database performance monitoring software to round out your monitoring view and more easily monitor response time across your IT infrastructure.