We live in a time where technology has spread to the majority of the population. The use of the internet has become a daily need, not only to get information, as until a few years ago, but to carry out all kinds of actions that until recently were unthinkable, both for the ease of access to the internet from home and with the popularization of smartphones and flat rate internet access.
In today’s multi-layered web application environment with balancers, web browsers, application servers and database servers, the traditional systems of monitoring to understand ourselves limited to monitoring the use of CPU, memory and available disk space are obsolete.
In these environments, performance problems often occur that will be very difficult to analyze if we use only the traditional ways of monitoring. The monitoring of these environments presents a challenge for the reason that they consist of the certain elements that should not be outside the scope of monitoring such as the following;
Application Servers
Within these services are running virtual machines of JAVA or .NET that have the portions of memory assigned and managed by the instances of themselves. The use of these portions of applications within the application servers such as Tomcat, WebSphere and Jboss are hidden from the metrics provided by the operating system, and therefore it is necessary to use the additional tools to obtain the key performance parameters. These key parameters are as follows;
Garbage Collection Time
This value allows us to get the percentage of the runtime that is spent on cleaning the objects that are present in the Heap Space but are no longer referenced and therefore can be eliminated. If the Heap Space is full and the garbage collection process is not able to free up the memory, it will be going on continuously leaving the JVM to handle the user transactions.
Percentage of Free Heap Space
It is the free percentage of the stack for the storage of the objects generated by running the application code.
Heap Consumption
Measured in Mega Bytes per second, it indicates the level of activity, readings/writings, in the Heap Space. The very high values in relation to the activity performed by the applications, the level of users and operations performed, will indicate the inefficiency in the use of such memory space.
