Establish a performance baseline

Many metrics that can help in alerting and troubleshooting are meaningful only if you understand normal patterns of performance. For example, monitoring an App Server for slow queries will require a different threshold on an application that spawns many long-running queries to the task server than on an HTTP App Server where queries are normally in the 100 ms range. Most enterprise-class monitoring tools support data storage to support this type of trend analysis. Developing a starting baseline and tuning it if your application profile changes will yield better results for developing your monitoring strategy.