The Art of Application Performance Testing, 2nd Edition

Appendix D. Sample Monitoring Templates: Infrastructure Key Performance Indicator Metrics

The following examples demonstrate groups of common server KPI metrics that I use in performance testing projects. I have provided examples of generic and application-specific templates to demonstrate the top-down approach I use when troubleshooting performance issues revealed by performance testing.

Generic KPI Templates

Monitoring the use of this first set of metric templates provides a good indication of when a server is under stress. The metrics configured are focused on fundamental capacity indicators such as CPU loading and memory consumption. This is the basic level of server monitoring I use when performance testing.

Windows OS : Generic KPI Template

You will probably recognize these metrics, since they are taken from the Windows Performance Monitor (Perfmon) application. This is a nice mix of counters that monitor disk, memory, and CPU performance data, together with some high-level network information that measures the number of errors encountered and data throughput in bytes per second. For many of these counters you will, of course, need to select the appropriate instances and sampling period based on your system under test (SUT) requirements. Make sure that the sampling period you select is not too frequent, as this will place additional load on the servers being monitored. The default of 15 seconds is usually sufficient to create enough data points without causing excessive ...