6. Services

Table of Contents

6.1. Counters
6.1.1. Counters charts
6.1.2. Using the legend to view one counter
6.2. Top N
6.2.1. HTTP top N charts
6.2.2. Units
6.2.3. Understanding the Top N services chart
6.2.4. Displaying end host information
6.2.5. Using the legend to drill-down into service data
6.2.6. Filtering for specific data

The Host sFlow standard, http://www.sflow.org/developers/specifications.php, defines application performance metrics that a Host sFlow agent exports using the sFlow protocol. A number of popular applications now include sFlow monitoring. For example, sFlow agents are now available for popular web servers, providing scalable performance monitoring of large web server clusters and load balancers.

The Services tab presents application performance statistics for services that are being monitored using sFlow. This tab includes two sub-tabs:

Counters
Trend charts showing how the overall volume of application transactions varies over time. See Section 6.1, “Counters”.
Top N
Trend charts showing the top contributors to application transaction volume and how the top contributors vary over time. See Section 6.2, “Top N”.

The ability to directly relate server and application performance to the corresponding network traffic is a key element in unifying management of cloud environments.

6.1. Counters

The counters tab shows how the overall volume of application transactions varies over time. It uses stacked area charts to display the application performance counters.

This tab includes a control bar which allows you to select the host and service for which you would like to view trends in transaction volumes, the application performance counters chart to display and the specific time interval (see Chapter 10, Selecting a time period ).

[Note] Note

When you have made changes to the selections for the chart, you can save these selections in a bookmark (see Section 1.4, “Navigating around sFlowTrend-Pro using browser history and bookmarks”) so that you can easily return to the same chart at a later date.

6.1.1. Counters charts

The following charts are available:

HTTP method
The trend in the number of operations per second for the various HTTP methods.
HTTP status
The trend in the number of operations per second with the various HTTP status codes.

6.1.2. Using the legend to view one counter

Sometimes one performance counter value can be much smaller than the other performance counters, making it hard to see the the smaller counter value trend. In this case, you can remove the other counter trends from the chart by clicking on the corresponding legend items. For example, when viewing the HTTP status chart, clicking with the left mouse button on 2xx status count/s in the legend will change the chart so that the 2xx status count/s trend is removed and the chart is rescaled, making the other trend lines more visible. You can remove all but one of the trend lines.You can redisplay a trend line by clicking on the corresponding legend item again.