Monitoring the response time of slow services

A service level monitoring (SLM) class is a monitoring object that times how long it takes for ZXTM and the back-end servers to respond to a request.

With a little TrafficScript logic, you can pick out individual requests that you wish to time. For example, a website may contain lots of static content (images, documents, web pages), and some dynamic applications which take longer to run. The following TrafficScript rule will associate all requests for '/search.cgi' with an SLM class so that you can observe how long it takes to process those requests:

if( http.getPath() == "/search.cgi" ) {
   connection.setServiceLevelClass( "search timer" );
}

This assumes that you have configuired an SLM class called 'search timer'. You can then use the activity monitor in ZXTM to graph the time it takes to process these requests, and the alerting system in ZXTM can raise an email alert if the requests start to take too long.

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] 01 July 2005