System Monitoring

Monitoring the system is crucial to understanding whether memory, CPU, disk, or network are limiting the performance the system. These key aspects should be monitored on both the ActiveMatrix BPM and database systems on a regular basis.

There are many tools available to monitor systems. On Linux, collectl (http://collectl.sourceforge.net/) can run as a background service continually collecting CPU, memory, disk, process and network statistics that can then be examined at a later date, as well as providing live statistics.

Sample output from collectl tool
Indications of a stressed system are:
  • Constantly high CPU (greater than 90%)
  • Disk writes or reads reaching the throughput of the sub-system
  • Total network traffic reaching the bandwidth limit

There are many other tools available, and you should use whichever tool you are comfortable with that can gather the information required during testing.