CFUnited - The CF8 Server Monitor - Adam Lehman

Adam Lehman, gave an interesting presentation on the new CF8 Server Monitor which was built using Flash Player 9 as the presentation engine.

The first point he made is that it is not just for use in production for monitoring your live server, 80% of use should be in development. You need to understand what your code is doing so that there are no surprises when application goes into production. In fact you should never run the memory tracker in production, as it will place too much load on the server.

There is a host of information in the various panels. For example, you can tell how many bytes are taken by each session so you can predict how many users you application can support. There is also a way to stop a hung thread.

The monitor shows each CFC and the method for each query being executed. Individual Errors are also displayed, with the stack trace information.

In production use, the monitor can create an alert when things reach a limit that you set up. Eg running out of memory, or slow response times. You can also set up garbage collection to happen when memory usage reaches a set point.

When a problem occurs you can take snapshots which show what is happening when the snapshot was taken. You can set the server to kill unresponsive threads or reject new requests.