eG Monitoring
 

Measures reported by ConsoleSystemTest

ConsoleSystemTest is an operating system-specific test and relies on native measurement capabilities of the operating system to collect various metrics pertaining to the CPU and memory usage of a host system. The measures made by this test are as follows:

Measurement Description Measurement Unit Interpretation
Cpu_util Indicates the percentage of utilization of the CPU time of the host system. Percent A high value could signify a CPU bottleneck. The CPU utilization may be high because a few processes are consuming a lot of CPU, or because there are too many processes contending for a limited resource. Check the currently running processes to see the exact cause of the problem. The detailed diagnosis capability, if enabled, provides a listing of the top 10 processes that are consuming more CPU.
System_cpu_util Indicates the percentage of CPU time spent for system-level processing. Percent An unusually high value indicates a problem and may be due to too many system-level tasks executing simultaneously. The detailed diagnosis capability, if enabled, provides a listing of the top 10 CPU-consuming processes executing on the system.
Run_queue_length This measure indicates the instantaneous length of the queue in which threads are waiting for the processor cycle. This length does not include the threads that are currently being executed. Number A value greater than 2 indicates processor congestion.
Num_blocked_procs Indicates the number of processes blocked for I/O, paging, etc. Number A high value could indicate an I/O problem on the host (e.g., a slow disk).
Swap_memory On Windows systems, this measurement denotes the committed amount of virtual memory. This corresponds to the space reserved for virtual memory on disk paging file(s). On Solaris systems, this metric corresponds to the swap space currently available. On HPUX and AIX systems, this metric corresponds to the amount of active virtual memory (it is assumed that one virtual page corresponds to 4 KB of memory in this computation). MB An unusually high value for the swap usage can indicate a memory bottleneck. Check the memory utilization of individual processes to figure out the process(es) that has (have) maximum memory consumption and look to tune their memory usages and allocations accordingly.  
Free_memory Indicates the free memory available. MB A very low value of free memory is also an indication of high memory utilization on a host. The detailed diagnosis of this measure, if enabled, lists the top 10 processes responsible for maximum memory consumption on the host.  
Scan_rate This measure indicates the memory scan rate. Pages/Sec A high value is indicative of memory thrashing. Excessive thrashing can be detrimental to application performance.

Note:

In the Windows version of the product, the Num_blocked_procs measure is not available.

For multi-processor systems, where the CPU statistics are reported for each processor on the system, the statistics that are system-specific (e.g., run queue length, free memory, etc.) are only reported for the "Summary" descriptor of this test.