Planning the Configuration for Monitoring

You start monitoring your sites by planning for capacity and by configuring your monitoring tools to keep monitoring overhead low. You should create monitoring configurations that can be saved and copied to other computers using the System Monitor in Microsoft Management Console (MMC). A monitoring configuration will help you highlight data center issues and visualize traffic flow through your system. Creating this configuration can also help you understand site software issues and see how the software is interrelated.

In planning your configuration, do the following:

  • Configure Performance Logs and Alerts to report data for the recommended counters at set intervals, such as every 10 to 15 minutes.

  • Retain logs over extended periods.

  • Store resulting data in a database, and query the data in order to analyze it and report on overall performance assessment, trend analysis, and capacity planning.

Capacity Planning

Capacity planning is the process of planning for application, hardware, and network requirements to support expected site traffic and to achieve site performance goals. You determine capacity by measuring the number of users to your site, determining how much demand each user puts on the server, and then calculating the computing resources (CPU, RAM, disk space, bandwidth and utilization, and network bandwidth) that they must have to support current and future usage levels.

To guarantee sufficient capacity, you must calculate how much computing hardware that you must have to handle the load that thousands or hundreds of thousands of users can put on your site. These calculations can help you find weak areas that can cause decrease in performance. You can resolve weak areas by adding hardware or by redesigning dynamic pages or other CPU-intensive tools.

For general information about Commerce Server performance and capacity planning, visit the Microsoft Web site.

Minimizing Overhead

Commerce Server performance counters and tools are designed for minimal performance overhead. However, performance tool operation is affected by file sizes and disk space taken up by log files, which contributes to overhead.

You can reduce file size and related disk space usage by extending the update interval. Also, you can log data to a disk other than the one that you are monitoring. Frequent logging also adds demand on disk input and output (I/O).

If monitoring overhead is a concern, run only Performance Logs and Alerts and do not use a System Monitor graph for monitoring your site. You may find that overhead increases under the following conditions:

  • You are running System Monitor in graph view.

  • You have selected an option other than the default (current value) for a report view.

  • You are sampling data at very frequent intervals (less than three seconds apart).

See Also

Other Resources

Monitoring Commerce Server Sites