eG Monitoring
 

Measures reported by SlowTransTest

Whenever users to your mission-critical web sites (on an IIS web server) or web services (overlying an IIS web server) complaint of slowdowns, the first step to troubleshooting these issues is identifying which specific transaction(s) to the web sites is causing the slowdown. For this, you will have to periodically monitor the responsiveness of key transactions to your web sites, so as to quickly and accurately identify slow transactions. The Slow Transactions test helps you achieve this. This test monitors user-configured transaction patterns, captures the response time of each configured pattern in real-time, compares these actuals with the desired levels of responsiveness (which is also configurable), and thus isolates and proactively alerts you to slow transactions. Note that, this test executes only on IIS web servers operating on Windows 2008, and does not execute on the IIS Web servers v8 and above.

Note:

To make sure that this test reports measures, do the following:

  • Configure a Web Server role on the target Windows 2008 server.
  • Install and configure Advanced Logging for the IIS web server operating on Windows 2008.

The measures made by this test are as follows:

Measurement Description Measurement Unit Interpretation
requestRate Indicates the rate of requests to this transaction. Requests/Sec  
numRequests Indicates the number of requests to this transaction during the last measurement period. Requests  
numRes200 Indicates the percentage of responses with the response code of 200. Percent Typically, successful requests are indicated using the response code 200 - 299.
numRes300 Indicates the percentage of responses with the response code of 300. Percent 300 responses could indicate page caching on the client browsers. Alternatively 300 responses could also indicate redirection of requests. A sudden change in this value could indicate a problem condition.
numRes400 Indicates the percentage of responses with the response code of 400. Percent A high value indicates a number of missing/error pages.
numRes500 Indicates the percentage of responses with the response code of 500. Percent Since responses with a status code of 500-600 indicate server side processing errors, a high value reflects an error condition.
minResTime Indicates the minimum response time of this transaction. Secs  
maxResTime Indicates the maximum response time of this transaction. Secs  
avgResTime Indicates the average response time for all requests to this transaction. Secs A low value is desired for this measure. A sudden or steady increase in this value could indicate a problem with the transaction.
totalData Indicates the total data transmitted by this transaction. KB  
avgData Indicates the data transmitted by this transaction on an average. KB  
numSlowReq Indicates the number of requests to this transaction with a response time greater than the specified THRESHOLD VALUE. Number Ideally, the value of this measure should be 0. A non-zero value indicates the existence of one/more slow transactions. Comparing the value of this measure across transactions will quickly point you to the transactions that are very slow.

Using the detailed diagnosis of this measure you can view the complete details of the slow transactions.

perSlowReq Indicates the percentage of requests to this transaction that were serviced slowly - i.e., the percentage of requests with a response time greater than the specified THRESHOLD VALUE. Percent A very low value is desired for this measure.

When users complaint of slowdowns while trying to access a web site (on the monitored IIS web server), you may want to compare the value of this measure across transactions to know which transaction is the slowest, and hence could be causing the slowdown.

avgSlowResTime Indicates the average response time of the slow requests to this transaction. Secs  
slowResThreshold Indicates the THRESHOLD VALUE configured for this transaction. Secs