Monitor Web application

Question

I made a web based application by using the java language, and I would like to monitor its performance periodically (e.g. response time). Also I want to display this information on the homepage of my application. Is that possible? Can I have any idea about how this can be made.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I guess JavaMelody is the most appropriate solution for you. It can be built into a Java application and due to this feature, it monitors the functionality inside the app. Using this platform, it’s possible to get much more specific parameters for your Java app, than via external monitoring. In addition, it allows you displaying some statistics on your app homepage. Moreover, you can build in the app the graphs from JavaMelody, that essentially facilitates the app monitoring.

Take a look at the detailed overview of JavaMelody: http://cases.azoft.com/enterprise-system-monitoring-solutions-business-apps/

Answer 2

You can take a look at stagemonitor. It is a open source java web application performance monitor. It captures response time metrics, JVM metrics, request details (including a call stack captured by the request profiler) and more. The overhead is very low.

Optionally, you can use the great timeseries database graphite with it to store a long history of datapoints that you can look at with fancy dashboards.

Example:

Take a look at the github page to see screenshots, feature descriptions and documentation.

Note: I am the developer of stagemonitor

Answer 3

It is possible.

The clearest way to go about it, providing true numbers is to simulate a client that performs some sort of activity that mimics the real usage. Then have that client periodically use the website.

This presupposes that your website has a means to accept inputs that do not impact the real back end business. Crafting such interfaces requires some thought, but is not beyond the ability of a person who could put together the web site in the first place. The key points are to attempt to emulate as much using the real website as possible, but guard against real business impact. Basically it is designing for a special user (the tester).

So you might have a special user that when logged in, all purchases are bound to a special account that actually is filtered out to appropriately not demand payment and not ship goods. Provided the systems you integrate with all share an understanding of this live testing account, you can simultaneously test alongside of real production post-deployment.

Such a structure provides a huge benefit. You get performance of the real, live running system. Performance tends to change over time, and is subject to the environment. By fetching your performance numbers on the live system, in the same environment, you get a much better view of what real users might be encountering. Also, you can differentiate and track performance for different activities.

Yes, it is a lot more to design and set up; however, if you are in it for the long run, the benefits are huge.

Answer 4

You can also consider to create your own custom web application monitor. Therfore, use the ProxyPattern and and create a concreate monitor. By using Spring framework you can easily swich on and off the monitor during runtime without re- deployment or restart of the web application. Furthermore you can create a lot of different specific monitors by yourself and are able to control what is beeing monitored. This gives you a maximum of flexibility, but requires a bit of work.

Answer 5

Why not checkout Munin monitoring? The website says

Munin the monitoring tool surveys all your computers and remembers what it saw. It presents all the information in graphs through a web interface. Its emphasis is on plug and play capabilities. After completing a installation a high number of monitoring plugins will be playing with no more effort.

SLAC at the Stanford university also keeps a large, quite well sorted list with various solutions for network monitoring among other things. SLACs list of Network Monitoring Tools, check for instance "Public domain or free network monitoring tools".

Answer 6

Depending on your environment, I would use a cron job or task that measures the response time to request your app using something like HttpClient. Then drop that information into a database table accessible by your app.

The answer here is the simplest way you can measure the time: How do I time a method's execution in Java?