Setting Up Your Monitoring Configuration
You begin monitoring your sites by planning for capacity and by configuring your monitoring tools to keep monitoring overhead low. You should create monitoring configurations that can be saved and copied to other computers using the System Monitor in the Microsoft Management Console (MMC). A monitoring configuration will help you highlight data center issues and visualize traffic flow through your system. Creating this configuration can also help you to understand any site software issues and to see how the software is interrelated.
In planning your configuration, do the following:
Configure Performance Logs and Alerts to report data for the recommended counters at regular intervals, such as every 10 to 15 minutes.
Retain logs over extended periods of time.
Store resulting data in a database, and query the data in order to analyze it and report on overall performance assessment, trend analysis, and capacity planning.
Capacity Planning
Keeping Monitoring Overhead Low
Capacity Planning
Capacity planning is the process of planning for application, hardware, and network requirements to support expected site traffic and to achieve site performance goals. You determine capacity by measuring the number of users to your site, determining how much demand each user places on the server, and then calculating the computing resources (CPU, RAM, disk space, bandwidth and utilization, and network bandwidth) necessary to support current and future usage levels.
To ensure adequate capacity, you must calculate how much computing hardware you need to handle the load that thousands or hundreds of thousands of users can put on your site. These calculations can help you find weak areas that can cause performance degradation. You can resolve weak areas by adding hardware or by redesigning dynamic pages or other CPU-intensive tools.
Keeping Monitoring Overhead Low
Commerce Server performance counters and tools are designed for minimal performance overhead. However, performance tool operation is affected by file sizes and disk space taken up by log files, which contributes to overhead.
You can reduce file size and related disk space usage by extending the update interval. Also, you can log data to a disk other than the one you are monitoring. Frequent logging also adds demand on disk input and output (I/O).
Increases in Monitoring Overhead
- If monitoring overhead is a concern, run only Performance Logs and Alerts and do not use a System Monitor graph for monitoring your site. You may find that overhead increases under each of the following conditions:
You are running System Monitor in graph view.
You have selected an option other than the default (current value) for a report view.
You are sampling data at very frequent intervals (less than three seconds apart).
Monitoring Recommendations
For diagnostic purposes, do the following before starting System Monitor or Performance Logs and Alerts on the computer you are using for monitoring:
Stop screen-saver programs.
Turn off services that are not essential or relevant to monitoring.
Run the System Monitor from a remote machine. By making this change, you move the majority of the CPU and I/O cost to the remote computer.
Increase the paging file to physical memory size plus 100 MB.
Use a private administrative network. During remote logging, frequent updating can slow performance due to network transport. Using a private administrator network, which is typically done with another network interface card (NIC), solves this issue. You can also reduce the sample of data collection. For example, if you are sampling data at three-second intervals, sample at five-second intervals. Also, you can use two network interfaces/computers so that each network segment is doing different operations. For example, one computer may be dedicated for updating news and another may be dedicated for updating stock trading transactions.
Additional recommendations
The following are additional recommendations for using performance tools with minimal overhead:
Analyzing performance results and establishing a performance baseline. Review logged data by graphing it using the System Monitor display or exporting it for printing. For detailed information about specific performance counters, see Commerce Server Performance Counters.
Setting alerts. Set alerts according to the counter values you consider unacceptable, as defined by your baseline evaluation.
Reducing counters. Reduce the number of performance counters to only those you need. For a list of recommended counters, see Hardware Performance Counters and Commerce Server Performance Counters.
Planning. Monitor trends for capacity planning and add or upgrade components as needed. Maintain logged data in a database and observe changes to identify changes in resource requirements. After you observe changes in activity or resource demand, you can identify where you may require additional resources.