Ubuntu Manpage: webvis - visualize system-level Web server activity

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:

network.tcp.drops
- rate of dropped connections

network.tcp.conndrops
- rate of embryonic connections dropped

network.tcp.timeoutdrop
- rate of connections dropped by rexmit timeout

network.tcp.rcvbadsum
- rate of packets discarded for bad checksums

network.tcp.rexmttimeo
- rate of retransmit timeouts

network.tcp.sndrexmitpack
- rate of data packets retransmitted

swap.pagesout - page swap out rate (indicating insufficient memory)

network.mbuf.failed
- rate of incidents where the kernel failed to find mbuf space

network.mbuf.waited
- rate of incidents where the kernel waited to find mbuf space

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

Disk
There are two cylinders showing disk metrics. The first cylinder shows the rate of
read (yellow) and write (violet) operations, aggregated over all disk spindles. The
second cylinder shows the average (over all disks) percentage of time for which a disk
is busy or active. This metric is not available in PCP1.x versions, therefore if
webvis is being used to monitor a host running PCP1.x this cylinder will not be
displayed.

To adjust the scaling of these objects, refer to the -b and -i options described
below.

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).

NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

FILES

PCP ENVIRONMENT

SEE ALSO