Servers View

The Web Performance line of products are capable of monitoring two important statistics on your server(s): CPU utilization (%) and memory usage (%). You may make the appropriate configurations to configure these statistics through the Servers View.

When you open the Servers View, you will be presented with a list of servers which are presently configured for monitoring. The graph on the right side of the view displays information being actively observed from your server. The check box next to the host name may be used to toggle whether or not the particular server is being actively monitored.

To start monitoring a new server, simply press the Add Server... button.

Here, you must decide what style of server monitoring to use. Three styles are supported:

  1. Windows to Windows - uses a built-in direct protocol to monitor the remote server (available only if both your server and the load testing workstation are running Windows).
  2. Java-based server on Unix - Web Performance provides a WAR file containing a servlet that will provide the necessary server statistics. The provided WAR is supported on Solaris and Linux.
  3. Custom monitoring (server script) - For unsupported platforms, a custom script may return the necessary server statistics in readable format (see script requirements later in this chapter).

For more information on setting up your server to be monitored, please see the Server Configuration section below.

Once a configuration has been selected, and the required fields filled in, pressing the "OK" button will attempt to connect to the server and verify that the server can be successfully monitored under normal conditions. Upon verification, the server will be added to the list of servers for statistics gathering during a load test.

Viewing Previous Results

The Servers View can also be used to display server statistics for a given series of load test results. In order to do this, simply uncheck the option to Show live statistics, and open a set of results. The view will update to display previously gathered information from the selected test. In order to switch back to the active configuration, simply re-check the Show live statistics option.

Server Configuration

Direct Windows monitoring

No server-side installation is necessary. However, the user running Web Performance Suite must have the appropriate Windows privileges to monitor the server. See your network administrator for details.

 

Note that you must log into the Windows Server from the client machine prior to beginning the test. The windows Direct monitoring is dependent on the Windows authentication established prior to the start of monitoring. For example, browsing a network share on the server that requires authentication will usually establish the required permissions.

 

The direct windows monitoring is the equivalent of using the Windows Performance Monitor (perfmon.exe) to monitor the % Committed Bytes In Use counter of the Memory performance object on the remote server.

UNIX server (with Java-based application server)

Install the WPIMonitor.war file in your server in the usual deployment folder. It will install a servlet named Monitor in the path /WPIMonitor/monitor.

 

note: the WPIMonitor.war file can be found in the product installation folder.

 

If necessary, you may modify the deployment descriptor for the servlet as necessary for your environment. However, if you change the path required to access the monitoring servlet, then you must configure the monitoring within Web Performance Suite as a custom script installation and provide the full URL to the Monitor servlet.

Custom monitoring (server script)

Web Performance can monitor any server via HTTP if a customized script is developed to return the server CPU% and memory% in the supported format. The following plain text content format is supported (MIME type text/plain):

version=1
CPU%=nnn
memory%=nnn

After writing and testing your script, enter the URL of the script into the URL field of the configuration dialog.