System monitoring and performance

You have now built your network and distributed application. You have also instituted various processes and mechanisms in anticipation of changes to the network structure and application logic over the course of its life. An additional, but no less essential, process that you must have in place and carry out from time to time is monitoring and performance measurement. Any production application you build for real-world users and institutions, especially in the enterprise world, must meet certain performance standards to be useful to end users and service providers. Therefore, knowing how well your distributed application performs, and striving to improve its performance, is a key maintenance task; any dereliction in this task may result in your network and application suite having short shelf lives.

The art (and science) of system performance measurement and analytics encompasses a broad and extensive set of topics, and it is not our intention...