The FairCom Server tracks and reports a wealth of performance-oriented statistics. The server’s Performance Snapshot capability enables the capture of performance monitoring data using a combination of configuration file options and the SnapShot c-tree API function.

Performance Monitoring Overview

By using these performance monitoring tools, you can more easily identify bottlenecks to understand whether performance problems are related to application issues, CPU constraints, or other areas. As there may be some overhead involved with the monitoring, FairCom recommends honing your monitoring needs to precise areas rather than monitoring every possible area.

You may want to establish baselines for your particular application in a QA lab so that you can later compare these results with data that comes in from the field to be able to more easily identify problems. Monitoring can also be beneficial to identify trends related to user activity- whether there are particular times of day when activity is highest, and whether particular operations can be scheduled at a later time of day to offset these peaks.

The performance data can be captured automatically at specified intervals or on demand in the following ways:

• The ctstat utility provides a command-line interface to the SnapShot API function, supporting output of FairCom Server statistics at the FairCom Server system, user, file, and function levels.
• Configuration file options support automatic performance snapshots by specifying the interval between automatic snapshots and the contents of the snapshots. The performance data captured by automatic snapshots are written to the FairCom Server system event log (SYSLOG) files.
• Use DIAGNOSTICS options to capture the automatic system snapshot data to the human-readable SNAPSHOT.FCS file.
• The SnapShot API function can control automatic snapshots, overriding configuration options (if any), and can capture on-demand performance data:
  • To either the SYSLOG files or to the human-readable SNAPSHOT.FCS file.
  • As a return to the calling program.

The following sections discuss how to use the performance monitoring abilities of the FairCom Server.

Performance Monitoring Using the ctstat Utility

The ctstat utility is a client utility used to display statistics collected by FairCom DB. It is found in the client folder of the installation and demonstrates use of the SnapShot() function.

Performance Monitoring using the SnapShot Utility

The SnapShot function provides full information about usage and the information that is returned.