Resource monitoring

When you apply load to a system under test, the amount of resources consumed by your system is increasing. If the capacity of the resources does not match the load, you can see performance issues in the results. Resource monitoring in HCL DevOps Test Hub (Test Hub) helps you monitoring the resources of a system and establish the performance metrics and usage data of the system. Thus, you can observe the health of these resources while a schedule is running.

You can use resource monitoring while running a schedule to capture data, such as processor or memory usage, or to monitor the availability of hosts and services by using counters. Test Hub provides a comprehensive view of a system under test to help determine problems. Hosts and services can be servers, virtual machines, or any local host or network services. You can also monitor remote hosts and services with agents.

Monitoring a host or a server

You can use resource monitoring to monitor any host and network service. This method is used for host targets that the service can reach directly. With Test Hub, you can also monitor performance metrics that are collected and stored by a monitoring system that is monitoring a host. You can use a Prometheus server or a data collector through an exporter, OpenMetrics exporter, for example.

To monitor resources on a local system, you must add the source of the resource monitoring data from the resource monitoring page. Then you have to enter some connection settings and select the counters to monitor the sources. The metrics and usage data are exposed in a graph for each selected counter.

Monitoring a remote host with monitoring agents

You can monitor remote hosts and services with agents through wider sets of data collectors, computers, and networks. The purpose is to capture CPU load, disk space, memory, and the running process for example.

Agent-based monitoring is useful when remote services are not directly accessible from Test Hub through the network. Agents are closer to the target that you want to monitor. You can set up the agent on an authorized host, for example, when access to an Apache httpd or NGINX server status page or a JVM JMX port, a Prometheus server, or an OpenMetrics exporter is restricted to one or few client hosts only. The configuration task is simplified, and no security changes are required.

Agent-based monitoring is mandatory to collect data from a Windows or Linux Performance host or from a Docker host.

To monitor a host across a monitoring agent, you must first set up a resource monitoring agent on the target host for which you want to collect the performance statistics and usage data. The agent establishes a connection with Test Hub. When the connection is set, the agent is showing up in the list of agents on the resource monitoring main page. Then, you can select the agent in the list of target sources in the dialog Access target from in the dialog that opens from Add a Source.

Click the links in the next section of this page for more details on the resource monitoring tasks that you can perform in Test Hub.