Difference between revisions of "AboutUsPerformanceMonitoring"

The responsiveness and performance of the site makes a big difference in how many pages visitors will view, and how often they will come back. A poorly performing site will also wear out our active members causing some of them to leave.

Monitoring Resources Internally

We have chosen to try an open source performance monitoring tool called Zabbix [1]. Zabbix includes many features including the following.

• Real-time performance, availability, and integrity monitoring
• Web site monitoring
• Data visualization through use of graphs, maps, and user-defined views
• Condition notifications (including e-mail and jabber)
• Distributed monitoring and configuration

The dashboard view and notifications can easily point out immediate issues with the backend that could potentially affect site performance. Even benign issues such as occasional load spikes are logged and can used to indicate potential problems on the horizon. This allows us to be more proactive and stay in step with site growth.

The graphs allow for similar, user-friendly views into the AboutUs environment. These can be utilized to identify trends. They can also show equipment, service, and resource relationships by comparing multiple graphs on a single page.

You will find the AboutUs Zabbix site at the following URL:

https://admin.aboutus.org/zabbix/

The same credentials for the AboutUs stats can be used to log into Zabbix. Please contact the systems administrator if you require a personal user account.

Points Of Interest

The layout of Zabbix is fairly self explanatory. Most general use will be under the Monitoring tab. While more detailed documentation can be found in the Zabbix manual [2], here is a list of particularly useful items.

• Monitoring / Overview - The Overview is refreshed every 30 seconds and includes a dashboard view of all triggers. Successful checks are presented with green boxes while problems show up as red. Grey and white boxes indicate triggers are disabled.

• Monitoring / Web - This page provides the status of HTTP site requests. Clicking on each item will provide download speed and response time graphs. It is important to note each item is a single HTTP request or a series of requests. This data does not represent a user session as requests for images, scripts, and external links are not followed. It does, however, show site performance trends and related backend performance impact.

• Monitoring / Latest data - While you can retrieve graph data under the Overview section by clicking on the colored box, this area provides performance related graphs for various triggers such as CPU, load average, memory, network throughput. A custom time period can be defined for each graph.

• Monitoring / Screens - Custom views can be created using graphs and other objects. An example view has been put together that includes the CPU utilization of all the database servers.

• Configuration / Screens - Custom screens can be defined here.

• Reports / Most busy triggers top 100 - Displays a list of the most common issues.