Knowledge Base

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Prerequisites In order to monitor a Linux server, SOASTA CloudTest must be able to establish an SSH connection to the server. If you are not sure how to enable this, consult your Linux documentation. If a firewall prevents SSH access, see Monitoring a Server Behind a Firewall.
About Memory Utilization on Linux Like other Linux monitoring tools, including "free" and the GNOME Task Manager, CloudTest monitoring intentionally excludes buffered and cached memory from the total usage statistics presented.   CloudTest excludes kernel buffers and cache because Linux is very aggressive about grabbing all the free RAM for kernel buffers and cache, and will give it back to user-level programs as soon as needed.   Without these exclusions, the memory usage would almost always display at 99-100% of the physical RAM on the machine for the reasons above.
Steps In the Central list, select Monitoring Server Groups.
Click the New Monitoring Server Group icon. The Monitoring Server / Monitor wizard appears:
Select Monitor Server and click Next.  The Name and Connection step is shown.
Type a name for the Monitoring Server and optionally provide a description.  Finally type the hostname or IP address of the server into the Host field and click Next.
The Resources step is shown. Check "System Resources" and click Next.
Select the version of Linux being monitored, then enter the SSH port number, the user name, and password.
Click the Test Connection button to test the connection. If the connection is successful, you will see a pop-up containing some information about the Linux server. If the connection fails, you will see an error message explaining what went wrong.
Click Next.
Review the information to be sure it is correct, then check the "Create a new Monitor for this Monitor Server" box and click Finish.
Enter a name for the Monitor and an optional description, then click Next.
At this point you can choose which statistics you are interested in. For each statistic, you can choose a "sample rate" which determines how often that statistic will be collected. Some of the statistics require an entry in the "Arguments" column. For example: For the "Network KBits Received" and "Network KBits Sent" statistics, you can enter the name of the network interface you want to monitor (for example, eth0 or eth1). If you do not enter a value, then the total of all network interfaces will be tracked (this excludes the loopback interface). For the "Per Process CPU Percentage", "Per Process Memory Usage", "Per Process Thread Count", and "Per Process Virtual Memory" statistics, you must enter the name of a process (for example, mysqld or httpd). In some cases, there may be multiple matching processes (for example, multiple Apache HTTP worker processes). When this happens, the total for all matching processes will be tracked.
When you are finished, click Next. Review the information to be sure it is correct, then click Finish.
Next steps To start or stop monitoring, see the topic "Starting and Stopping a Monitor" To automatically monitor the Linux server every time a certain test starts, see the topic "Starting a Monitor Automatically When a Test Composition Runs"