Monitoring Performance

Performance monitoring support was added in version 3.2

Performance testing is an advanced feature. If you are just starting out with argus it is recommended that you hit your back button and skip this until you are more familiar with using Argus.

As you use argus for some time, and add more and more things to be monitored, it is natural to wonder how well argus can handle the number of things you are throwing at it, or whether it is time to upgrade to a faster server.

As you monitor more and more, argus will use more memory and more cpu. Standard tools such as 'ps' and 'top' are useful for this. But you're already running the most advanced monitoring system in the world, why not have argus monitor itself?

Argus provides 2 interfaces to various bits of internal performance data:

argusctl status

Running the command argusctl status will display information about the running argus:

    ARGUS/2.0 200 OK
    status:   running
    version:  3.2
    objects:  312
    notifies: 294
    services: 198
    uptime:   0:28:40
    idle:     92.47% 95.28% 95.44%
    monrate:  12.77 10.21 10.40 per second

Most interesting are the percent idle (the above argus is doing very little work and quite idle), and the monrate, the number of tests argus is doing per second. These are both given as 1, 5, and 15 minute averages.

Service Self ...

Argus also exports various data to itself as a Service, so you can do testing and graphing. Some useful examples:

    Group "Myself" {
        graph: yes
        Service Self/idle {
            title:  Percent Idle
            calc:   ave-rate
            scale:  0.01
            # let someone know when it is time to upgrade h/w
            minvalue:  20
            messagedn: time to buy faster server
        }

        Service Self/tested {
            title:  Monitoring Rate
            ylabel: tests per second
            calc:   ave-rate
        }

        Service Prog {
            # how much memory is argus using?
            # your ps may be different
            command:        ps -p $ARGUS_PID -o vsz | tail -1
            uname:          VSZ
            title:          Memory Use
            ylabel:         kBytes
        }
    }