webvis(1) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | FILES | PCP ENVIRONMENT | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

WEBVIS(1)                General Commands Manual                WEBVIS(1)

NAME         top

       webvis - visualize system-level Web server activity

SYNOPSIS         top

       webvis [-CVz] [-A align] [-a archive] [-b maxbusy] [-h host] [-i
       maxio] [-m max] [-n pmnsfile] [-O time] [-p port] [-r maxreq] [-S
       time] [-T time] [-t interval] [-x version] [-Z timezone]
       [interface ...]

DESCRIPTION         top

       webvis displays an overview of system level Web server performance
       statistics collected from the Performance Co-Pilot (PCP)
       infrastructure.  The display is modulated by the values of the
       performance metrics retrieved from the target host (which is
       running pmcd(1) and the pmdaweblog(1) Performance Metrics Domain
       Agent) or from the PCP archive log identified by archive.  The
       display is updated every interval seconds (default 2 seconds).

       As in all pmview(1) scenes, when the mouse is moved over one of
       the bars, the current value and metric information for that bar
       will be shown in the text box near the top of the display.

       The height of the web request and network activity bars is
       proportional to the performance metric values relative to the
       maximum expected activity, as controlled by the -m and -r options
       (see below).  Similarly the -b and -i options control the scaling
       for disk activity bars.

       The bars in the webvis scene represent the following information;

       Requests by Size
           At the front of the scene, the "Requests by Size" row of bars
           shows the rate of requests for different size requests (the
           histograms are defined by the following byte counts: 0, 3
           Kbytes, 10 Kbytes, 30 Kbytes, 100 Kbytes, 300 Kbytes, 1 Mbyte,
           3 Mbytes and larger than 3 Mbytes).  Notice that the size
           divisions are not evenly distributed.  The "size" is the data
           portion of the response to each Web server request.  These
           rates are aggregated across all monitored Web servers.

       Requests by Type
           This row of bars shows the request rate for each type of HTTP
           request (get, post, head and other), aggregated across all
           monitored Web servers.  For a detailed display showing the
           break down of requests per Web server, see weblogvis(1).

       Network
           For every network interface there are two stacked bars.  One
           of the bars shows the input traffic while the other bar shows
           the output traffic.  The stacks are composed of the number of
           errors (red), the number of drops (orange) and the number of
           packets (green).  In general, if there are any "dropped input
           packets" then the corresponding network interface is
           saturated, or there are insufficient network resources
           available in the kernel to adequately service the input
           request load.  If this is the case then the Alarm Conditions
           rows (see below) may provide more detail into the source of
           the problem.

       Alarm Conditions
           The red row of bars shows an assortment of TCP error
           conditions (aggregated for all network interfaces), the orange
           bars show critical kernel buffer allocation problems, and the
           yellow bar shows severe paging conditions.  If any of these
           bars have a non-zero height then the system being monitored
           may require kernel parameter tuning, software reconfiguration
           or more hardware resources.  The performance metrics behind
           the bars are:

           network.tcp.drops
                  - rate of dropped connections

           network.tcp.conndrops
                  - rate of embryonic connections dropped

           network.tcp.timeoutdrop
                  - rate of connections dropped by rexmit timeout

           network.tcp.rcvbadsum
                  - rate of packets discarded for bad checksums

           network.tcp.rexmttimeo
                  - rate of retransmit timeouts

           network.tcp.sndrexmitpack
                  - rate of data packets retransmitted

           swap.pagesout
                  - page swap out rate (indicating insufficient memory)

           network.mbuf.failed
                  - rate of incidents where the kernel failed to find
                  mbuf space

           network.mbuf.waited
                  - rate of incidents where the kernel waited to find
                  mbuf space

       CPU This column shows CPU utilization, aggregated over all CPUs.
           (CPU idle time is not included in the column).

       Disk
           There are two cylinders showing disk metrics.  The first
           cylinder shows the rate of read (yellow) and write (violet)
           operations, aggregated over all disk spindles.  The second
           cylinder shows the average (over all disks) percentage of time
           for which a disk is busy or active.  This metric is not
           available in PCP1.x versions, therefore if webvis is being
           used to monitor a host running PCP1.x this cylinder will not
           be displayed.

           To adjust the scaling of these objects, refer to the -b and -i
           options described below.

       Mem There are two bars showing memory metrics.  The first bar
           shows utilized memory, with different colors representing
           different types of utilization (kernel, user, etc), while the
           second bar shows the amount of free memory.  If webvis is
           being used to monitor a host running PCP1.x then only the bar
           showing free memory will be displayed.

       If any optional interface arguments are specified in the command
       line, then just the network interfaces matching the interface
       arguments will appear in the Network section.  By default, all
       interfaces will be used.  The interface arguments are used as
       patterns for egrep(1) matching against the interface names, so ec
       would select all external Ethernet interfaces for a Challenge S.

       webvis uses pmview(1), and so the user interface follows that
       described for pmview(1), which in turn displays the scene within
       an Inventor examiner viewer.

       webvis passes most command line options to pmview(1).  Therefore,
       the command line options -A, -a, -C, -h, -n, -O, -p, -S, -t, -T,
       -x, -Z and -z, and the user interface are described in the
       pmview(1) man page.

       Options specific to webvis are:

       -b maxbusy
              Controls the maximum (normalization) value for the average
              percentage of the time active over all disks.  The default
              value is 30% active.

       -i maxio
              Controls the maximum (normalization) value for the sume of
              the aggregate disk read and disk write rates.  The default
              value is 100 I/Os per second.

       -m max Controls the maximum (normalization) value for the packet
              input and packet output rates.  The default value is 750
              packets/second.

       -r maxreq
              Controls the maximum Web request rate.  The default is 5%
              of the maximum packet rate (i.e. 38 requests/second by
              default).  The maximum Web error rate is fixed at 20% of
              the maximum Web request rate (i.e. 7 errors/second by
              default).

       -V     The derived configuration file for pmview(1) is written on
              standard output.  This may be saved and used directly with
              pmview if the user wishes to customize the display, or
              modify some of the normalization parameters.

FILES         top

       $PCP_VAR_DIR/pmns/*
              default PMNS specification files
       $PCP_VAR_DIR/config/pmlogger/config.web
              pmlogger(1) configuration file that can be used to create a
              PCP archive suitable for display with webvis

PCP ENVIRONMENT         top

       Environment variables with the prefix PCP_ are used to
       parameterize the file and directory names used by PCP.  On each
       installation, the file /etc/pcp.conf contains the local values for
       these variables.  The $PCP_CONF variable may be used to specify an
       alternative configuration file, as described in pcp.conf(4).

SEE ALSO         top

       pmcd(1), pmchart(1), pmdaweblog(1), pmdawebping(1), pmdumplog(1),
       pminfo(1), pmlogger(1), pmval(1), pmview(1), weblogvis(1),
       webpingvis(1), pcp.conf(4) and pcp.env(4).

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the PCP (Performance Co-Pilot) project.
       Information about the project can be found at 
       ⟨http://www.pcp.io/⟩.  If you have a bug report for this manual
       page, send it to pcp@groups.io.  This page was obtained from the
       project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨https://github.com/performancecopilot/pcp.git⟩ on 2025-02-02.
       (At that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found
       in the repository was 2025-01-30.)  If you discover any rendering
       problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is
       a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
       corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
       (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       man-pages@man7.org

Performance Co-Pilot                                            WEBVIS(1)

Pages that refer to this page: pmdaweblog(1)weblogvis(1)webpingvis(1)