NAME

webvis - visualize system-level Web server activity

SYNOPSIS

webvis [-CVz] [-A align] [-a archive] [-b maxbusy] [-h host] [-i maxio] [-m max] [-n pmnsfile] [-O time] [-p port] [-r maxreq] [-S time] [-T time] [-t interval] [-x version] [-Z timezone] [interface ...]

DESCRIPTION

webvis displays an overview of system level Web server performance statistics collected from the Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) infrastructure. The display is modulated by the values of the performance metrics retrieved from the target host (which is running pmcd(1) and the pmdaweblog(1) Performance Metrics Domain Agent) or from the PCP archive log identified by archive. The display is updated every interval seconds (default 2 seconds).

As in all pmview(1) scenes, when the mouse is moved over one of the bars, the current value and metric information for that bar will be shown in the text box near the top of the display.

The height of the web request and network activity bars is proportional to the performance metric values relative to the maximum expected activity, as controlled by the -m and -r options (see below). Similarly the -b and -i options control the scaling for disk activity bars.

The bars in the webvis scene represent the following information;

Requests by Size

At the front of the scene, the "Requests by Size" row of bars shows the rate of requests for different size requests (the histograms are defined by the following byte counts: 0, 3 Kbytes, 10 Kbytes, 30 Kbytes, 100 Kbytes, 300 Kbytes, 1 Mbyte, 3 Mbytes and larger than 3 Mbytes). Notice that the size divisions are not evenly distributed. The "size" is the data portion of the response to each Web server request. These rates are aggregated across all monitored Web servers.

Requests by Type

This row of bars shows the request rate for each type of HTTP request (get, post, head and other), aggregated across all monitored Web servers. For a detailed display showing the break down of requests per Web server, see weblogvis(1).

Network

For every network interface there are two stacked bars. One of the bars shows the input traffic while the other bar shows the output traffic. The stacks are composed of the number of errors (red), the number of drops (orange) and the number of packets (green). In general, if there are any "dropped input packets" then the corresponding network interface is saturated, or there are insufficient network resources available in the kernel to adequately service the input request load. If this is the case then the Alarm Conditions rows (see below) may provide more detail into the source of the problem.

Alarm Conditions

The red row of bars shows an assortment of TCP error conditions (aggregated for all network interfaces), the orange bars show critical kernel buffer allocation problems, and the yellow bar shows severe paging conditions. If any of these bars have a non-zero height then the system being monitored may require kernel parameter tuning, software reconfiguration or more hardware resources. The performance metrics behind the bars are:

CPU

This column shows CPU utilization, aggregated over all CPUs. (CPU idle time is not included in the column).

Disk

Mem

There are two bars showing memory metrics. The first bar shows utilized memory, with different colors representing different types of utilization (kernel, user, etc), while the second bar shows the amount of free memory. If webvis is being used to monitor a host running PCP1.x then only the bar showing free memory will be displayed.

If any optional interface arguments are specified in the command line, then just the network interfaces matching the interface arguments will appear in the Network section. By default, all interfaces will be used. The interface arguments are used as patterns for egrep(1) matching against the interface names, so ec would select all external Ethernet interfaces for a Challenge S.

webvis uses pmview(1), and so the user interface follows that described for pmview(1), which in turn displays the scene within an Inventor examiner viewer.

webvis passes most command line options to pmview(1). Therefore, the command line options -A, -a, -C, -h, -n, -O, -p, -S, -t, -T, -x, -Z and -z, and the user interface are described in the pmview(1) man page.

Options specific to webvis are:

-b maxbusy

Controls the maximum (normalization) value for the average percentage of the time active over all disks. The default value is 30% active.

-i maxio

Controls the maximum (normalization) value for the sume of the aggregate disk read and disk write rates. The default value is 100 I/Os per second.

-m max

Controls the maximum (normalization) value for the packet input and packet output rates. The default value is 750 packets/second.

-r maxreq

Controls the maximum Web request rate. The default is 5% of the maximum packet rate (i.e. 38 requests/second by default). The maximum Web error rate is fixed at 20% of the maximum Web request rate (i.e. 7 errors/second by default).

-V

The derived configuration file for pmview(1) is written on standard output. This may be saved and used directly with pmview if the user wishes to customize the display, or modify some of the normalization parameters.

FILES

$PCP_VAR_DIR/pmns/*

default PMNS specification files

$PCP_VAR_DIR/config/pmlogger/config.web

pmlogger(1) configuration file that can be used to create a PCP archive suitable for display with webvis

PCP ENVIRONMENT

Environment variables with the prefix PCP_ are used to parameterize the file and directory names used by PCP. On each installation, the file /etc/pcp.conf contains the local values for these variables. The $PCP_CONF variable may be used to specify an alternative configuration file, as described in pcp.conf(4).

SEE ALSO

pmcd(1), pmchart(1), pmdaweblog(1), pmdawebping(1), pmdumplog(1), pminfo(1), pmlogger(1), pmval(1), pmview(1), weblogvis(1), webpingvis(1), pcp.conf(4) and pcp.env(4).