Managing Application Performance OLAs › Create an Application Performance OLA for a Group of Networks

Create an Application Performance OLA for a Group of Networks

Create a performance OLA to define the expected levels of service for a user-defined application across a group of client networks with similar latency characteristics.

The management console creates a default OLA for each user-defined application to measure performance across all networks that do not have an assigned network type. In general, this is not recommended for monitoring Network Round Trip Time and Total Transaction Time because of differences in network latency between remote locations.

When you update the threshold values in a default OLA, your changes are dynamically applied to any new OLAs for that application that are configured to use the default OLA’s value. For example, if the default OLA for the POP3 application requires at least 90% of the observations for Network Round Trip Time during a 1-hour interval to be at least 5ms, and you create an OLA for the POP3 application in the Austin network type, the default percentage of observations is 90% and the Network Round Trip Time threshold is 5 ms. If you change POP3’s default OLA threshold for Network Round Trip Time, the management console dynamically updates the Network Round Trip Time threshold for the POP3 Austin’s OLA to use the new default value.

When creating an OLA, you can customize a threshold value to override the dynamic default value. If you change the number of thresholds or minimum observations for an OLA metric without customizing the threshold values, the change applies to the default OLA.

Before you create an OLA, it is recommended that you monitor an application for a month to determine its normal performance.

Follow these steps:

1. Click the Administration page.
2. Click Policies, Performance OLAs in the Show Me menu.
3. Browse the list of OLAs in the Performance OLA List. If there are no applications in the list, no user-defined applications exist.

   By default, the management console creates a Default OLA for each user-defined application that applies to networks without an assigned network type.

4. Click Add Custom by Network Type to create an application OLA for a group of client networks.

   Customize Thresholds by Network Type opens.

5. Select the application and network type that corresponds to the appropriate remote location and click OK.

   Edit OLA Thresholds opens.

6. Edit the threshold settings for each OLA metric and click OK.

   For information about editing OLA thresholds, click Help.

7. Click the link to synchronize monitoring devices with the current client network, server subnet, and application definitions on the management console.

   Monitoring devices temporarily stop monitoring application performance during synchronization. To minimize interruptions to monitoring, complete all of your changes before synchronizing monitoring devices.

8. Wait a full reporting cycle, up to one hour, to see how the threshold changes compare to the actual response times observed by the management console.
   1. On the Management page, in the Show Me menu, click Performance Detail OLA.
   2. If necessary, adjust the values for a operational level threshold percentage or increase the value of the threshold level so that the application meets the operational level agreement for the remote site.

More information:

Edit an Application Performance OLA

Establish Operational Levels from Historical Data