What Coldfusion 8 standard edition performance monitoring free tools are available?

Question

The company I work for only has standard edition, and can not afford a pricey monitoring solution. And this is installed on windows 2003, IIS 6, Coldfusion 8.

But we need a way to remotely look at performance of the coldfusion server, since perfmon can not send data remotely.

And we don't want to put in tons of data into sql server, to store and then view remotely.

Any ideas or suggestions?

Thank you for answers, but we only have standard edition, and need solutions for that version.

I like fusion reactor, but as mentioned, it is pricey. Because of the nature of the coldfusion licensing system, I don't think you'll find anything, at least I haven't. — Jay, Oct 19 '09 at 17:10
What kind of worries me, is what kind of impact does monitoring performance of a server, have on it's own performance....It's important to have good knowledge of server issues,...but what are it's costs? — crosenblum, Oct 19 '09 at 18:27

score 8 · Accepted Answer · edited Jul 07 '13 at 10:35

8

Charlie Arehart's CF411 lists several monitoring tools, some free, some not.

Here's the current list:

CFStatShot, free, from Dave Spurr. CFStat Yahoo Desktop Widget.
ColdFusion AJAX System Monitor, free, from Steve Brownlee
ColdFusion JVM Memory Monitor, from Dan Switzer
ColdFusion Tracker, free, from David Boyer. Access application, session and memory information
FlexMon CF monitor, free, from Tariq Ahmed (also available at RiaForge)
FusionAnalytics, commercial, from Intergral (makers of Fusionreactor)
FusionReactor, commercial, from Intergral
Scope Enhancer, free tool from Steve Brownlee. Places java system info into the CF Server scope to assist with monitoring JVM setup.
SeeFusion, commercial, from Webapper
ServerStats, free from Mark Lynch
WhosOn CFC, open source, from Shane Zehnder. Simple tool to help track users visiting your site.

Here's a couple of Java EE tools (not CF-specific, but might still be useful):

edited Jul 07 '13 at 10:35

Arjan Tijms

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answered Oct 19 '09 at 17:13

Peter Boughton

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As always, Mr. Charlie Arehart has the answer... :) Way to go Sir! – crosenblum Oct 19 '09 at 17:23
Yep, and it's far too easy to forget his *huge* list - I wouldn't have guessed half of the above existed! :) – Peter Boughton Oct 19 '09 at 17:25
Sadly most of those require the performance monitor, which doesn't come in our standard edition. – crosenblum Oct 19 '09 at 17:47
Bah, that sucks. Only suggestion I have then is to look for more generic JEE monitoring tools - that's what FR actually is, but there might be others ones available. – Peter Boughton Oct 19 '09 at 17:51

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 20 '09 at 09:13

It might be worth mentioning: You can roll your own!

For example on Windows you can use the supplied Performance Monitor (perfmon) to record all the CF metrics that are displayed by cfstat. For example:

Avg Db Time
Avg Req Time
Running Req
Queued Reqs

Combine this with standard CPU and memory metrics and you'll well on the way to gathering some very useful information. Record say every 30 seconds. The data can be saved to the DB or saved to CSV which you can then read say once a hour/day/whenever and graph to see variations over time.

We use this in addition to our CF Server Monitor and it works a treat for both long term trends and to create and compare 'snapshots' of different servers.

Hope that helps!

For some reason when running perfmon, are unable to get any coldfusion stats...Even with settings in admin set correctly. — crosenblum, Oct 20 '09 at 17:08
We had to implement this fix as the Coldfusion Metrics were not available in perfmon: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/404/kb404026.html. Once we fixed this up we were good to go. Hope it helps. — Ciaran Archer, Oct 21 '09 at 09:11

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 19 '09 at 23:24

FusionReactor is @300 bucks. You can run it in a separate process -- on a separate server, even -- and consequently it doesn't interfere with CF itself, unlike CF8's Server Monitor. I can't recommend FR and its competitor SeeFusion enough. Both are great products, both are very reasonably priced, and both can run out of process, which is what you are looking for I believe.

What Coldfusion 8 standard edition performance monitoring free tools are available?

3 Answers3