Resource Monitoring
Monitor Across Your Web Infrastructure
Monitoring resources (hardware, network, load balancer, firewall, Web server, database, application server, content management system, etc.) and capturing usage information about those resources is a key component of professional Web testing. When there are problems, sifting through the data can be like finding a needle in the haystack as you search across the entire infrastructure of your Web application.
When executing and analyzing performance and load tests, development and operations teams often need to manually combine and correlate this data from disparate sources displayed in multiple dashboards. This can be a time-consuming and error-prone process that may miss key metrics, resulting in higher costs and an incomplete picture.
Monitoring Integration via SOASTA’s Extraction Layer
Integrating the rich load and performance results gathered by CloudTest® with the system resource and transaction-level visibility provided by products such as CA’s APM, IBM’s Tivoloi and other monitoring systems helps eliminate these issues. The integration with third party monitors leverages SOASTA’s real-time, streaming analytics engine to provide the Performance Intelligence designed to quickly pinpoint the source of problems during cloud testing. In addition, SOASTA includes system level monitoring of its own for those customers who may not already have monitors in place.
Resource information can be captured from any available resource in the Web application infrastructure-not just the Web server hosting the Web application. SOASTA CloudTest can monitor all three tiers of your Web application-the Web server, the application server, and the database server. It can also capture valuable information about other components in your network architecture-load balancers, for example.
SOASTA CloudTest’s integrated monitoring is implemented in one of two ways:
Agent-less approach
The agent-less approach makes use of open network protocols such as SSH (secure shell), SNMP, and RMI, to connect to any remote server that you wish to monitor. Any SOASTA CloudTest Appliance with access to the destination machine can capture resource information. This is the preferred method for capturing information on servers inside the same LAN as it does not require an installed application and has a minimal impact on performance.
Agent-based approach
The agent-based approach is primarily for target servers that are behind the firewall, and does not require direct access from the SOASTA CloudTest Appliance to the target server. Instead, the SOASTA CloudTest Conductor, installed on the target server, creates an outbound HTTP connection to the SOASTA CloudTest Appliance and provides the resource information. This approach is also required when interfacing with Windows performance counters.
