CODEWITHSUNDEEP
google-cloud-platformstackdrivergoogle-cloud-stackdriver
zino
zino

Reputation: 1612

Is it possible to measure HTTP response latencies without changing my server code?

I have a small number of HTTP servers on GCP VMs. I have a mixture of different server languages and Linux based OS's.

Questions

A. It it possible to use the Stackdriver monitoring service to set alerts at specific percentiles for HTTP response latencies?

B. Can I do this without editing the code of each server process?

C. Will installing the agent into the VM report HTTP latencies?

For example, if the 95th percentile goes over 100ms for a certain time period I want to know.

I know I can do this for CPU utilisation and other hypervisor provided stats using:

https://console.cloud.google.com/monitoring/alerting

Thanks.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1664

Answers (2)

Parth Mehta
Parth Mehta

Reputation: 1917

Request latencies are extracted by cloud load balancers. As long as you are using cloud load balancer you don't need to install monitoring agent to create alerts based 95th Percentile Metrics.

Monitoring agent captures latencies for some preconfigured systems such as riak, cassandra and some others. Here's a full list of systems and metrics monitoring agent supports by default: https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/api/metrics_agent

But if you want anything custom, i.e. you want to measure request latencies from VM you would need to capture response times yourself and configure logging agent to create a custom metric which you can use to create alerts. And as long as you are capturing them as distribution metrics you should be able to visualise different percentiles (i.e. 25, 50, 75, 80, 90, 95 and 99th etc.) and create alert based on that.

see: https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/logs-based-metrics/distribution-metrics

Creating Distribution metrics

Upvotes: 2

Pievis
Pievis

Reputation: 1994

A. It it possible to use the Stackdriver monitoring service to set alerts at specific percentiles for HTTP response latencies?

If you want to simply consider network traffic, yes it is possible. Also if you are using a load balancer it's also possible to set alerts on that. What you want to do should be pretty straight forward from the interface, however you can also find more info in the documentation.

If you want to use some advanced metric on top of tomcat/apache2 etc, you should check the list of metrics provided by the stackdriver monitoring agent here.

B. Can I do this without editing the code of each server process?

Yes, no need to update any program, stackdriver monitoring works transparently and will be able to fetch basic metrics from a GCP VMs without the need of the monitoring agent, including network traffic and cpu utilization.

C. Will installing the agent into the VM report HTTP latencies?

No, the agent shouldn't cause any http latencies.

Upvotes: 1

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