Monitoring a Corporate Web Site

The InsureMe Company is a fictitious company that provides insurance quotes in real time to customers over a website. The primary advantage of InsureMe over other insurance companies is the ability to provide instant feedback to the customer. As a result, the website for InsureMe must be up 99.999% of the time. The company infrastructure is comprised of the following:

• Several web servers located in a DMZ.
• Several servers that reside on the internal network.
• Host middle-tier components.
• A database server on the back end.
  
  What to Monitor?
  
  InsureMe's network administrators have identified several key areas that they want to monitor, as well as other areas that will benefit other departments.
  
  Website
  
  The primary point of contact is the website. Several critical paths have been identified, such as the home page, the quotes page, the policy page, and the agents contact page. Cuevision Network Monitor is deployed in two locations, internally and externally, using a personal computer connected directly to an Internet service provider. The external personal computer is located in the Network Operations Center. This personal computer provides a visual tool for the operators to see the response time of the web pages, as well as to notify them visually of a response code or content errors. Both installations of Cuevision Network Monitor are configured with email and popup notifications. The internal personal computer running Cuevision Network Monitor is also configured to watch critical services on the websites.
  
  Middle Tier
  
  The middle tier servers run Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS), Microsoft Message Queue (MSMQ), and other vendor-supplied applications used to process data received by them. The internally located installation of Cuevision Network Monitor is configured to monitor each critical server using the ping watch. The MTS and MSMQ services are configured to be monitored. An application watch was configured to monitor the vendor-supplied applications and restart them if they were not running. Finally, a custom watch item is configured to monitor the available disk space on each server. A global notification is set up to email the network administrator.
  
  The Database
  
  The Oracle database server has several database tools already in use by the database administrators for monitoring the database health. The InsureMe administrators use a ping watch item to monitor the physical layer. The administrators also use a custom watch item to execute a query created by the database administrators for a rudimentary test to ensure that the database itself is responding to queries.
  
  Summary
  
  The InsureMe Company is able to employ a monitoring system by deploying two installations of Cuevision Network monitor, one in the DMZ and one in the internal network. They use the summary reports to provide availability information to the management team. In the future, they look at other deployment opportunities such as providing a copy to the help desk, business analysts, or managers to allow them to monitor items that interest them. The InsureMe Company also plans to deploy additional copies of Cuevision Network Monitor in order to provide redundancy.