Load Impact is proud to present our latest feature – server metrics! With the server metrics feature you will be able to see performance metrics from your own servers along with the regular Load Impact metrics. These include, but are not limited to, CPU usage, memory usage, network activity and disk usage. This will allow you to correlate the different metrics and make it really easy to pinpoint the bottlenecks of your site.

To use the server metrics feature you will need to install a small program, what we call the server metrics agent, on the server you would like to see metrics from. Once installed, the agents will appear on your test configuration page in a new section. Choose the ones you wish to use in the test and run the test as you normally would. The metrics can then be plotted as graphs in the result page, just like any other result data.

The server metrics feature is in beta, but available for everyone, so there might be a few bumps that we need to flatten out. We will hopefully catch most of them over the next few days with the help of you all. Initially we have set a limit to 3 server metrics agents per test. This limit might be adjusted later. If you need more server metrics agents in the same test, feel free to contact us.

If your server is a Windows server, we provide an installer with server metrics agent and everything needed to run it. For our Ubuntu users, we provide a repository and a deb package. For everyone else, we provide a tar file. The source code for the server metrics agent will be put on GitHub for anyone to see and read. If you are hesitant to installing software on your server, then just go ahead and read the source code and you will be able to tell exactly what the agent does, and perhaps more important – does not, do.

So, what do you need to do to get started with server metrics testing? The first thing you should do is to generate a server metrics token. This token is used to identify your agents when they are talking to Load Impact. You generate the token on your profile page. The next step would be to download and install the server metrics agent for your server platform. Once the server metrics agent is configured you select them in your test configurations. Please refer to install instructions in the README file for details.