How to effectively monitor http in Jenkins - performance

Is there some way effectively monitor http in Jenkins master? Monitor plugin provides some graphs and tables but it is really hard to understand how the end user ‘feels’ while working on the Jenkins web page. Is there any page freezes? What is the maximum delay? Maybe I don’t use the Monitor plugin correctly, so is there any way to harvest such a data from provided graphs?

The monitoring plugin is the one that I use. It tells me which pages are taking the longest time to load/hang/etc. I"m not sure if there is something else out there that can do something like this. Maybe a third party tool like newrelic perhaps.

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The best way to schedule||automate MarkLogic data hub flows/custom steps

I use DMSDK to ingest data; I have multiple custom flows to run following data ingestion. Instead of manually running the flows one by one, What is the best way to orchestrate MarkLogic data hub flows?
gradle, trigger or other scheduling tools?
I concur with Dave Cassel that NiFi, or perhaps something like MuleSoft, or maybe even Camel is a great way to manage running your flows. Particularly if you are talking about operational management.
To answer on other mechanisms:
Crontab doesn't connect to MarkLogic itself. You'd have to write scripts or code to make something actually happen. You won't have much control either, nor logging, unless you add that as well.
We have great plugins for Gradle that make running flows real easy. Great during development and such, but perhaps less suited for scheduling or operational tasking.
Triggers inside MarkLogic only respond to insertion of data, so you'd still have to initiate an update from outside anyhow.
Scheduled Tasks inside MarkLogic has similar limitations to Crontab and Gradle. It doesn't do much by itself, so you have to write code anyhow. It provides no logging by itself, nor ways to operationally manage the tasks, other than through Admin ui.
JAR package might depend on what JAR package you actually mean. You can create a JAR of your ml-gradle project, but that doesn't give you a lot of gain over calling Gradle itself.
Personally, I'd have a close look at the operational requirements. Think of for instance: need to get status overview, interrupt schedules, loops to retry at failure, built-in logging, and facilities to send notifications when attention is needed.
HTH!
There are a variety of answers that will work, of course; my preference is NiFi. This keeps any scheduling overhead outside of MarkLogic, with the trade-off that you'll need to have NiFi running.

Monitoring solution for EC2 based deployment

We have some 20 or so servers in EC2, most are dynamically spawned (scaling groups).
We're looking for a solution to monitor the uptime of our application.
As an added bonus this solution could also extend to actually monitoring the servers involved so its easy to go back in time and see what happened just before a downtime or whatnot.
We're looking for a hosted solution ideally, and it should be easy to scale with it (it needs to somehow dynamically deal with servers being added/removed with no interaction from us).
Anyways, hoping for some recommendations from you guys.
A bit of background ...
We're currently using a custom Nagios setup, its been reduced to basically doing a simple http check now that the servers have become fully dynamic. We've already been using PagerDuty to deliver the pages. It does ok, but for the maintenance cost we could well be using a http check # Server Density of Pingdom.
I've looked briefly at ServerDensity, and it does look promising, I especially like their install mechanism of just dumping their files into your AMI and it takes care of the rest.
I'd like to know what options there are tho before diving deeper into any particular solution.
We use a combination of Server Density for monitoring and PagerDuty for alerting. The two work quite well together.

Remote Execution in Ruby (Capistrano or MCollective) to collect cloud server performance metrics

I am looking for a way to collect data remotely from various cloud instances (EC2, Rackpsace). The Rackspace API provides no way for collecting server performance metrics (ie load average, cpu usage, memory) via it's API, otherwise this would have never been asked.
I started looking at solutions like Capistrano or Mcollective (I have also considered collectd), but I am unsure of which one would best suit my application. I am trying to avoid using ssh keys for trending purposes (I don't want to have to keep logging in to collect these metrics) The script I am writing is a Ruby script which reboots a cloud server if it's load average is over a certain number. Because these providers don't expose these metrics via their API, I am looking at a way to gather them myself, and I am new to the Ruby community so after briefing over the documentation for all of these tools, I still haven't been able to get a sense of which framework would work best, or if there are other alternatives.
It sounds like Capistrano is more suited to be a deployment tool, although it can perform remote tasks, so after I read the documentation for that it was pretty much out for the purposes of my script.
MCollective looks really attractive for what I am trying to do but it seems I would have to write my own RPC style plugin for this purpose.
I've also considered plugging into some greater monitoring system such as Nagios, Munin, Zenoss, Hyperic, etc, but I'd rather not install some large bulk monitoring system when all I want to collect is but a few simple metrics.
If your intention is to trigger certain actions based on the system performance (like restarting when cpu usage is too high), you should check out god.
I'm not sure if this is also useful when you want to generate some performance statistics over a longer time period. Personally, I'm using Munin for this, but if you don't like it maybe you can find something on Ruby Toolbox | Server Monitoring.

Performance logging/monitoring API/product

I'm not sure how to categorize this question, so let me just explain what I would like and hopefully it will make sense.
I'm after a product (with an API) which I can send different numbers to with tags, and it will take care of all the monitoring/logging stuff.
So for example, say I have a program that downloads a file from a website every 10 seconds. I would like to monitor how long each of these downloads is taking. It is quite easy in my application to time how long it takes. I would now like to send this number and tag (e.g., tag='download time', value = '1.234') to a 3rd party product. The 3rd party product will now store this value/tag for me. The product will have a website I can go to, and configure a bunch of things. So in this example, I could setup an alert like "if 'download time' > 5 send me an email". I could also visit a website, and view a graph of the logged values and maybe some random statistics (e.g., how often the value has been in the warning/error zone).
I think that's about it. Sure it wouldn't be too hard to do this myself, but I'm no web designer and it'd end up looking pretty ugly. The more user friendly this kind of product is the more willing users will be to look at the data and actually monitor stuff.
Does such a service exist?
EDIT: Products similar to this: http://dashboard.kpilibrary.com/. This is pretty much exactly what I was after, but am still searching around.
There are many monitoring tools out there. Nagios or RHQ (http://rhq-project.org/) come to mind. Most of the tools work a little different: rather than throwing stuff at them, they have plugins that actively go out and do something to do the measuring. In your example, the plugin would download the file and then report the measurement data to the central server, which can then show you graphs or run alerts on it.
On Windows, you can use this:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771692%28WS.10%29.aspx
(Windows Performance Monitor)
It pretty much does what you are looking for:
Passively collects performance data (E.g. CPU Usage)
Can be fed App specific performance metrics (E.g. download time)
Can alert you on various thresholds
Has a reporting interface for analyzing metrics
EDIT : http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749249.aspx , more documentation on this.
This answer is specific to Windows.
If you are looking to analyze events from various systems and you also what the opportunity to create your own events you should consider ETW.
The ETW system allows you to consume data events from any number of sub-systems. You can look at an exhaustive list of built in providers by running the following command:
logman query providers
The beauty of ETW is that you also have the opportunity to create your own providers and push your own data into the resulting report. This is a high-performance logging mechanism and is used by Windows itself for many performance investigations.
The resulting report will be an ETL file. This is a standard file that can be viewed using xPerf, ships with Windows SDK, or the build-in ETL analyzer, tracerpt.exe.

How can I consume Firebug net panel data programmatically?

My agile team will be adding new features to a existing realty website. As we add the features we want to have a better handle on the site's overall performance as well as the performance of particular pages.
I would like to automate the gathering of performance metrics on a request/response basis for each page (e.g. what sub requests are sent out by the browser, how many are there, how much data is transferred, and how long did each request take to fulfill).
Firebug currently captures this information in its net panel, however, I haven't found any way to programmatically pull this information out.
Does anyone know of a way to pull this information out after a page has loaded?
We are currently running our user acceptance tests with Selenium and I have considered adding this feature to the selenium interface so that our tests could run and collect the data without starting any other service.
All suggestions are welcome, including ones that leverage other tools/methods to gather the performance metrics.
Thank you.
Jan Odvarko has written a Tutorial on how to use the new listener functionality within Firebug to log net panel results:
"Since Firebug 1.4a13 the Net panel introduces, among other things, several new events that allow to easily collect all network requests and also related info gathered and computed by Firebug.
This functionality should be useful also in cases where Firebug extensions want to store network activity info into a local database or send it back to the server for further analysis (I am thinking about performance statistics here)."
Take a look at the NetExport extension for FireBug.
Steps:
enable autoexport in preferences( you can automate this one as well)
choose the folder where the data is to be added
Read the file
While it isn't directly a Firebug solution, perhaps something like Jiffy would help?
Jiffy pretty much works like a server based version of Firebug's measurement tools. I haven't used it in anger yet, but it may do what you're looking for?
http://code.google.com/p/jiffy-web/
Jiffy allows developers to:
measure individual pieces of page rendering (script load, AJAX execution, page load, etc.) on every client
report those measurements and other metadata to a web server
aggregate web server logs into a database
generate reports
There is a way to use ySlow to beacon out performance data to a URL of your choice. It's not well documented, the only info I found was here:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/exceptional-performance/messages/490?threaded=1&m=e&var=1&tidx=1
Aside from that I would look into writing a Firebug plugin, I think you can access most Firebug properties. Here's a tutorial: http://www.firephp.org/Reference/Developers/ExtendingFirebug.htm
Ben,
I've done this by extended Selenium RC's ProxyHandler to queue up the URLs seen and then allow you to pull them down via some other API. It requires that you proxy everything, which isn't the default behavior of Selenium. The nice thing is that Selenium ends up being both the place to drive automation and collect the results seen.
This is probably a feature we'll soon add to Selenium RC right after we get 1.0 out the door (we're very close!).
Okay I admit this is not a direct answer but how about going right to the source? Cut out FireBug and go to the web server. Can the server log events with sufficient granularity to allow calculation of the information you require? Parsing the log file into useful data should not be particularly difficult and has the advantage of being user-platform independent and has the potential to log a greater set of data than that offered by FireBug (Awesome tool btw).

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