The extensible plugin architecture of dynaTrace opens many doors for our user community. dynaTrace users download additional monitor, task and action plugins on the dynaTrace Community Portal to extend the functionality of the dynaTrace APM Platform.

The latest addition is a plugin provided by MCG Systems out of Denmark. MCG created a plugin to monitor the Apache Web Server Status Page. The data provided on that page is pulled into dynaTrace to be used for monitoring, performance analysis and performance management. Here is a screenshot of a dynaTrace Dashboard that visualized the data queried from an Apache Web Server Instance:

dynaTrace Dashboard showing Apache Web Server Status Counters

What information can be monitored?

The plugin pulls the information from the Apache Web Status Page. Check out the public available status page on apache.org and see what it provides. The plugin pulls all provides metrics like Requests per Second, Bytes per Second, Bytes per Request, Busy vs. Idle Worker Processes. It also analyzes the Scoreboard values providing additional status information like Waiting for Connection, Closing Connections, DNS Lookup, Reading Request, …

This allows you to monitor these values in a nice dashboard – as shown above – but also allows you to correlate the values with your other performance metrics, e.g.: end user response times or use it for long term trend analysis, capacity planning or regression analysis.

How to get the plugin?

If you are a dynaTrace user log on to the Community Portal and download the Apache Monitor Plugin. You will find detailed installation and setup instructions on the plugin’s community page. Feel free to provide feedback via comments.

Thanks again to the guys at MCG Systems for that great plugin.

Related posts:

1. How to Monitor Oracle Database Performance An Oracle database provides several v$ views to query information...
2. Proof of Concept: dynaTrace provides Cloud Service Monitoring and Root Cause Analysis for GigaSpaces In this blog – Challenges of Monitoring, Tracing and Profiling...
3. Week 2 – The many faces of end-user experience monitoring Inspired by a comment of Wim Leers on one of...
4. Instrumenting SQL Server Managed Stored Procedures Starting with SQL Server 2005 a database developer has the...
5. Tracing problems in Project Stonehenge and other heterogeneous systems In my previous blog post I discussed that interoperability...