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.
Related
I have a REST api.
It offers the services get person, get price, get route
how can I determine how long does each call on each of this services take?
For example get person is very fast=ms 5; get route takes 2sec as it needs to make a remote call to Google API.
I could get the time at the beginning of the request and just before the response is submitted, compute the difference and log that to a database.
But that would be pretty much overhead, so how would you do it? would you do it at all, or just rely on on-machine profiling? what tools would you use that minimize overhead?
What I want is to determine if there is any component that in production could have low availability.
Thank you
So it looks like you want 2 things:
Minimal impact on your production environment
Figuring out how much each request takes
In that case I would go for the IIS logs. Windows Azure Diagnostics you can get this out-of-the-box by adding the module and configuring it. As a result your IIS logs will be stored in your storage account.
After that you can download these logs and use Log Parser to execute some interesting queries which allow you to find the slowest pages, pages with most hits, pages with most exceptions... Log Parser can be a little hard to work with if you never used it before. Take a look at the blog post by Scott Hanselman covering the Log Parser Lizard GUI tool: Analyze your Web Server Data and be empowered with LogParser and Log Parser Lizard GUI:
This powerful tool can give you all the information you need with minimal impact on your production instances.
I was wondering if there is a tool to keep track of application performance. What I have in mind is a tool that will listen for updates and register performance metrics published by an application. i.e. time to serve a request, time a certain operation took to finish. And this tool would then aggregate the data and measure performance trends.
If you want to measure your application from outside, then you can use RRDtool to collect the data.
You can use slamd for webapp written in Java.
For Django use hotshot.
Search for profiler + your language, framework
Take a look at HP SiteScope. It's ability to drive the system with a Web User Script, to monitor the metrics on the backend, even to the extent of creation of custom shell scripts and database queries, plus the ability to add logic for report/alert against these combined data sets appears to be what you need.
Other mechanisms that you might consider would be a roll your own service using CURL to push information in, queries to the systems involved to pull metrics or database information and then your own interface for alerting and reporting.
Then it becomes a cost question, can you roll the level of functionality for less money than you can purchase an already existing solution on the open market.
Ref:
HP SiteScope Wiki Page
Recently I had a project in which I had to get some data from particular software system to a portlet. The software used a database, and I spent a fair bit of time modeling the data I wanted and then creating a web service so that my portlet could grab the information.
Then it suddenly struck me that I was wasting my time. I grabbed BIRT, tossed it into a portlet, and then just wrote some reports that directly grabbed the necessary data from the database. I was done in an afternoon.
I understand that reporting is a one way street, but this got me thinking. Reporting tools can be very effective for creating reports (duh) from your actual data, but when you're doing this you're bypassing your model which except in simple cases is not a direct representation of your data as it exists in your database.
If you're writing a data-intensive application and require the ability to perform non-trivial reporting, do you bypass your application and use something like BIRT or Crystal Reports? How do you manage these tools as part of your overall process? Do you consider the reports you write as being part of your application and treat them as such? A report is a view and a model and a controller (if you will) all in one big mess, how do you deal with and interpret and plan for that?
Revised question: it's possible and even common that a report will perform some business calculations that in a perfect world you would like to have contained in your application. This can lead to a mismatch of information given back to the user. On the other hand, reporting tools make it so easy to gather and display information that it's hard to take a purist's approach and do everything from within the application. Are there any good techniques for ensuring that the data in your reports matches the data that you might be showing in the regular GUI?
I see reporting as simply another view on the data, not a view/model/controller in one (well, maybe a view and controller in one).
We have our reports (built in sql 2008 reporting services) consume a service in our application layer to get data (keeping with our standard, that data access is in a repository). These functions could do a simple query or handle very complex processing that would be a nightmare in your reporting evironment or a stored procedure. In practice, we find this takes no longer than coding up some one-off stored procedure that will, as your system grows and grows, become a nightmare to maintain.
Treating reporting as simply a one-off or not integrating into your application design is a huge mistake.
Reporting is crucial. Reporting is mostly crucial to share values collected in one system to external users, e.g. users not directly using the system (eg management for sales figures). So reporting is a lot more than just displaying facts and figures and is something central to almost every system that drives a commercial.
At least the more advanced systems allow you to enhance them: with your own reusable "controls". Even a way back can be implemented - if you just use the correct plugins. Once I wrote a system to send emails out of a report, because the system did not allow for change. It worked - though it was not meant to be used that way ;)
Reports make a good part of the application, and you gain a lot freedom if you make reports changeable for your customers. Sometimes you come up with more possibilities than you thought of when you built the system in the first place.
So yes, for me reporting is part of the system.
Reports are part of your app but because they are generally something a user will have strong ideas about than, say, your data capture UI, I'd sacrifice purity for convenience/speed of delivery and get back to "real" coding... :-)
As soon as you've done a report, users want another one or change the colour or optional grouping or more filtering or... something that takes you away from whizzier stuff... so I don't bust a gut maintaining purity.
This is a fine line indeed. You don't want to spend too much time building reports (that users want you to change all the time anyway) but you don't want to duplicate logic by putting business logic into your reports! With our reporting products at Data Dynamimcs I think we have reached a happy medium between these two tradeoffs.
By using the ObjectDataProvider (see links below for more info) you can bind the report directly to business objects (plain old objects) so you don't have to bypass your business layer for getting data. At the same time we provide a way to reference and use functions from other libraries in your report. This way if you have some code configured already to do some business logic calculations you can reuse those functions directly within your report. You can see an example of this in the links below too.
Binding to Objects for your Data (see "Object Provider" section): http://www.datadynamics.com/Help/ddReports/ddrconDataSetAndObjectDataSource.html
Adding Custom Code to your reports Walkthrough: http://www.datadynamics.com/Help/ddReports/ddrwlkCustomCode.html
Using Custom Assemblies (referencing shared libraries/dlls from your report): http://www.datadynamics.com/Help/ddReports/ddrconCustomCode.html, and http://www.datadynamics.com/Help/ddReports/ddrtskCreatingAnInstanceMethod.html
Scott Willeke
Data Dynamics / GrapeCity
The way I've always worked with reports is to consider part reports as part of the code-base, and stored in the source along with the application. In some contexts, reports are more important than the application, in that management makes business decisions off of report data, having the wrong information can cause them to cancel a product line, cancel a campaign, or fire a sales person. Obviously, this depends highly on your management and your application.
Regarding keeping your model consistent, this is a bit trickier question. One way to ensure consistent model between reports and your application is to use stored procedures (or views) to retrieve data, depending on your application's architecture.
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).
Are there any open source (or I guess commercial) packages that you can plug into your site for monitoring purposes? I'd like something that we can hook up to our ASP.NET site and use to provide reporting on things like:
performance over time
current load
page traffic
SQL performance
PU time monitoring
Ideally in c# :)
With some sexy graphs.
Edit: I'd also be happy with a package that I can feed statistics and views of data to, and it would analyse trends, spot abnormal behaviour (e.g. "no one has logged in for the last hour. is this Ok?", "high traffic levels detected", "low number of API calls detected") and generally be very useful indeed. Does such a thing exist?
At my last office we had a big screen which showed us loads and loads of performance counters over a couple of time ranges, and we could spot weird stuff happening, but the data was not stored and there was no way to report on it. Its a package for doing this that I'm after.
It should be noted that google analytics is not an accurate representation of web site usage. This is because the web beacon (web bug) used on the page does not always load for these reasons:
Google analytics servers are called by millions of pages every second and can not always process the requests in a timely fashion.
Users often browse away from a page before the full page has loaded and thus there is not enough time to load Googles web beacon to record a hit.
Google analytics require javascript to be installed which can be disabled.
Quite a few (but not substantial amount) of people block google-analytics.com from their browsers, myself included.
The physical log files are the best 'real' representation of site usage as they record every request. Alternatively there are far better 'professional' packages, of which Omniture is my favourite, which have much better response times, alternative methods for recording actions and more functionality.
If you're after things like server data, would RRDTool be something you're after?
It's not really a webserver type stats program though, I have no idea how it would scale.
Edit:
I've also just found Splunk Swarm, if you're interested in something that looks "cool".
Google Analytics is free (up to 50,000 hits per month I think) and is easy to setup with just a little javascript snippet to insert into your header or footer and has great detailed reports, with some very nice graphs.
Google Analytics is quick to set up and provides more sexy graphs than you can shake a stick at.
http://www.google.com/analytics/
Not Invented here but it's on my todo list to setup.
http://awstats.sourceforge.net/
#Ian
Looks like they've raised the limit. Not very surprising, it is google after all ;)
This free version is limited to 5 million pageviews a month - however, users with an active Google AdWords account are given unlimited pageview tracking.
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55543
http://www.serverdensity.com/
One option is to use external monitoring tools, which will monitor the web performance from outside the firewall by simulating end user activities.
Catchpoint Systems has an interesting approach that requires very little coding and gives you the performance stats from outside the datacenter and from inside the asp.net (like processing time, etc)
http://www.catchpoint.com/products.html