Is there an application that is capable of monitoring AND logging information (to file) about another process (in particular IIS aspnet_wp.exe) like (in periods of time):
- memory usage of process
- cpu usage
Or maybe there is another way to monitor IIS process?
Thanks Pawel
You can check Process Monitor from Microsoft.
Process Monitor is an advanced
monitoring tool for Windows that shows
real-time file system, Registry and
process/thread activity. It combines
the features of two legacy
Sysinternals utilities, Filemon and
Regmon, and adds an extensive list of
enhancements including rich and
non-destructive filtering,
comprehensive event properties such
session IDs and user names, reliable
process information, full thread
stacks with integrated symbol support
for each operation, simultaneous
logging to a file, and much more.
One choice would be Process explorer http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx
You might want to look at the ANTS Performance and Memory Profilers from Red Gate. I'm using their memory profiler to track down some memory issues as I write this.
Pretty much any monitoring system or framework that allows custom checks is capable of this.
You write your check and just put an extra line in it to post/print/put something to a file of your choice.
I for example use sensu for which I wright custom checks in ruby.
So I can easily do something like
if %x[{ping]}
ok
%x[{ print ‘all is well’ > syslog]}
end
and similar to that you can do for most other monitoring systems like Nagios etc.
Related
I will apologize in advance if this question is considered 'too broad', but I think it is a relevant question.
I enjoy writing programs that are designed to operate in a 'hands off manner'. And by that, I simply mean programs that monitor and respond to real-time data with no manual control from me (for the most part). However, I run into an issue where I have network issues or the program simply gets in a weird state and freezes. Besides the issues of program bugs and robustness, a real problem is I simply don't have a monitoring process to notify me when these programs freeze.
So my question:
Do there exist frameworks for monitoring real-time processes? I'm think something that can be hosted on a web server so that I can view my programs from any web capable device. Furthermore, this would be convenient to trend and monitor data I'm scraping from the web. I'm sure I could whip up something myself, but I'd imagine there is some type of frame work for fast/easy development of GUIs and offers plotting, graphs, etc.
Any ideas?
I recommend you take a look to eHorus. Their beta program is being opened now and it's completely free!
My suggestion is scada-lts, github: https://github.com/sdtabilit/Scada-LTS it's open source and free, if you have any questions please contact me.
I have come across a lot of tools to monitor Linux servers which could generate alerts as well when the CPU usage goes alarmingly high, or the disk space goes very low etc.
However, in terms of Ejabberd I couldn’t find an exisiting module which could do something similar. I am particularly looking to receive alerts pertaining to mnesia getting overloaded, space availability etc. and other basic parameters worth monitoring.
Have a look at Exometer. It can report via SNMP. It doesn't come with the monitoring you're talking about out of the box but you should be able to configure it to report on whatever you need.
SNMP support comes standard with Erlang. You should have a look at Erlang/OTP os_mon. Depending on your needs, it may do what you want out of the box.
I am using grinder in order to generate reports for the performance tests for my application. But I noticed that it does not generate any report on CPU and memory usage. On further investigation, I found that Grinder does not provide this information. Now, my question is, is there any tool that can be hooked up with grinder, to record the CPU and memory usage details?
As you have discovered, this is not supported directly in The Grinder itself. You will need to use a collection of tools to accomplish this.
I use a combination of Quickstatd, Graphite, and Grinder to Graphite to get all my results in the same place where I can see them. If you need to support Windows, you can probably use collectd (with ssc-serv and the Graphite plugin) instead of Quickstatd, which is based on bash scripts.
You can also pull in server side metrics (like DB lookups per second, etc.) with tools like jmxtrans, statsd, and metrics.
Having all that information in the same place is really powerful, and can give you some good insights.
If you grind a Java server, you can get data via JMX from OperatingSystemMXBean and MemoryMXBean.
Then add the data to a Grinder user Statistic and the data will end up in the -data.log
grinder.statistics.registerDataLogExpression("Load", "userDouble0")
..
grinder.statistics.forCurrentTest.setDouble("userDouble0", systemLoadAverage)
the -data.log can directly be fed into Gnuplot
gnuplot> plot 'client-0-data.log' using 2:7 title "System Load"
How do you isolate a performance issue to a specific component of the application infrastructure? Specifically, are there distinct markers in the result logs that distinguish between bottlenecks at web, application and/or database server levels?
I was asked this question in an interview and went blank on it. Seems this information is not available anywhere.
In addition to SiteScope and other agentless monitoring of system components, you need to make sure your scenario and scripts are working as expected. This includes proper error checking and use of transactions (and a host of other things). If the transactions are granular enough, this will give you insight into at least the requests that have performance issues. Once you have these indicators, work with the infrastructure team to review logs and other information. Being an iterative process, tests can be made to focus on a smaller and smaller section of the infrastructure.
In addition, loadrunner scripts don't have to be made strictly 'coming in through the frontdoor'. If you have a multi-tiered system, scripts can be made to hit the web/app/database servers directly.
For what to look for, focus on any measurements that have 'knees' or 'hockey stick' type of behaviour. You can hook into any of the server resource type measurements directly in the controller and integrate other team's stats in the analysis phase. Compare with benchmarks at lower virtual user levels to determine what is acceptable and unacceptable.
Good luck!
If the interview is focused on LoadRunner and SiteScope is considered - I'd come to conclusion that it's more focused on HP/Mercury solutions.. In that case I'd suggest you to look into HP Diagnostics and it's LoadRunner integration capabilities.
This type of information is usually not available by just looking at the standard results from a performance test.
Parts of the information you are looking for MAY be found by using SiteScope to monitor all the relevant servers in the test. SiteScope offers many counters to look at such as CPU, Memory, Disk I/O and Network I/O - as seen on each server.
This information perhaps gives clues as to where the bottleneck is, and the more counters you add to SiteScope, the bigger the change to pinpoint the bottleneck.
It is a very common misconception that AppServer and DBServer bottlenecks could be identified by just looking at the raw response times or hits, pages etc (web protocol), unless of course the URI accessed defines the exact component(s) in the system...
What, at a minimum, should an application health-monitoring system do for you (the developer) and/or your boss (the IT Manager) and/or the operations (on-call) staff?
What else should it do above the minimum requirements?
Is monitoring the 'infrastructure' applications (ms-exchange, apache, etc.) sufficient or do individual user applications, web sites, and databases also need to be monitored?
if the latter, what do you need to know about them?
ADDENDUM: thanks for the input, i was really looking for application-level monitoring not infrastructure monitoring, but it is good to know about both
Whether the application is running.
Unusual cpu/memory/network usage.
Report any unhandled exceptions.
Status of various modules (if applicable).
Status of external components (databases, webservices, fileservers, etc.)
Number of pending background tasks (if applicable).
Maybe track usage of the application and report statistics on most/less used functionalities so you know where optimizations are most beneficial.
The answer is 'it depends'. Why do you need to monitor? How large is your operations staff? Do you need reporting? What is the application environment? Who cares if the application fails? Who cares if an exception happens? Are any of the errors recoverable? I could ask questions like these for a long time.
Great question.
We've been looking for some application-level monitoring solution for our needs some time ago without any luck. Popular monitoring solution are mostly addressed to monitor infrastrcture and - in my opinion - they are too complicated for a requirements of most of small and mid-sized companies.
We required (mainly) following features:
alerts - we wanted to know about
incident as fast as possible
painless management - hosted service wouldbe
the best
visualizations - it's good to know what is going on and take some knowledge from the data
Because we didn't find suitable solution we started to write our own. Finally we've ended with up-and-running service called AlertGrid. (You can check it for free of course.)
The idea behind it is to provide an easy way to handle custom monitoring scenarios. Integration API is very simple (one function with two required parameters). At the momment we and others are using it for:
monitor scheduled tasks (cron jobs)
monitor entire application logic execution
alert on errors in applications
we are also working on examples of basic infrastructure monitoring using AlertGrid
This is such an open ended question, but I would start with physical measurements.
1. Are all the machines I think are hosting this site pingable?
2. Are all the machines which should be serving content actually serving some content? (Ideally this would be hit from an external network.)
3. Is each expected service on each machine running?
3a. Have those services run recently?
4. Does each machine have hard drive space left? (Don't forget the db)
5. Have these machines been backed up? When was the last time?
Once one lays out the physical monitoring of the systems, one can address those specific to a system?
1. Can an automated script log in? How long did it take?
2. How many users are live? Have there been a million fake accounts added?
...
These sorts of questions get more nebulous, and can be very system specific. They also usually can be derived reactively when responding to phsyical measurements. Hard drive fill up, maybe the web server logs got filled up because a bunch of agents created too many fake users. That kind of thing.
While plan A shouldn't necessarily be reactive, it is the way many a site setup a monitoring system.
Minimum: make sure it is running :)
However, some other stuff would be very useful. For example, the CPU load, RAM usage and (in multiuser systems) which user is running what. Also, for applications that access network, a list of network connections for each app. And (if you have access to client computer(s)) it would be cool to be able to see the 'window title' of the app - maybe check each 2-3 minutes if it changed and save it. Also, a list of files open by the application could be very useful, but it is not a must.
I think this is fairly simple - monitor so that you can be warned early enough before something goes wrong. That means monitor dependencies and the application itself.
It's really hard to provide specifics if you're not going to give details on the application you're monitoring, so I'd say use that as a general rule.
At a minimum you want to know that the system is healthy. This is subjective in what defines your system is healthy. Is it computers are up, the needed resources exist, the data is flowing through the system, the data is properly producing results, etc, etc.
In my project we do monitoring of most of this and then some. It really comes down to what is the highest level that you can use to analyze that everything is working. In our case we need to know down to the data output. If you just need to know down to the are these machines up it saves you on trying to show an inexperienced end user what is wrong.
There are also "off the shelf" tools that will do a lot of the hard work for you if you are just looking too hard into data results. I particularly liked Nagios when I was looking around but we needed more than it could easily show so I wrote our own monitoring system. Basically we also watch for "peculiarities" in the system, memory / cpu spikes, etc...
thanks everyone for the input, i was really looking for application-level monitoring not infrastructure monitoring, but it is good to know about both
the difference is:
infrastructure monitoring would be servers plus MS Exchange Server, Apache, IIS, and so forth
application monitoring would be user machines and the specific programs that they use to do their jobs, and/or servers plus the data-moving/backend applications that they run to keep the data flowing
sometimes it's hard to draw the line - an oversimplified definition might be "if your team wrote it, it's an application; if you bought it, it's infrastructure"
i think in practice it is best to monitor both
What you need to do is to break down the business process of the application and then have the software emit events at major business components. In addition, you'll need to create end to end synthetic transactions (eg. emulating end users clicking on a website). All that data would be fed into an monitoring tool. In the past, I've done JMX for applications of which flowed into Tivoli Monitoring's JMX Adapter and then I've done scripts that implement a "fake user" and then pipe in the results into Tivoli Monitoring's Script Adapter. Tivoli Monitoring takes the data and then creates application health and performance charts from that raw data.