Monitoring Production Servers
If you manage a Web farm of computers that are running Commerce Server, you can monitor system performance with Windows Server System Monitor or other similar tools to predict where bottlenecks may occur. You can effectively monitor your production servers by running calibration tests, updating usage profiles, and monitoring performance counters for Commerce Server.
Run Calibration Tests
A redundant array of independent disks (RAID) array, or similar disk subsystem has very different performance characteristics depending on the actual hardware setup. As a best practice, you should calibrate the subsystem to determine the following elements:
Maximum physical disk reads per second.
Maximum physical disk writes per second.
Maximum disk bytes per second.
Modern disk subsystems have tiers of complexity. For single disk drives or simple SCSI solutions, the % Disk Time counter is an accurate reflection of the capacity of the physical disk. For more complex multi-disk configurations, the disk queue can grow to the number of active spindles in the array before any items are actually waiting to be transferred.
For the newest Low Voltage Differential (LVD) or Fiber Channel disk systems, the issues are more complex. For these high-end systems, you should watch performance and capacity with the tools the vendor supplies. Additionally, there is a maximum bandwidth limit in the system bus of the server and the SCSI or Fiber Channel interface. You should compare the total disk throughput to these limitations.
Update Usage Profiles
The usage profile is a statistical model of an average user interaction and the maximum number of concurrent users that the site has to support at its peak. An important part of site monitoring is to monitor users to determine whether user behavior has changed. Watching growth trends in user activity is important. However, more important is to give this data to your developers, testers, and capacity planners so that they can plan for future hardware and software requirements.
Use the Profiles System performance counters to update and monitor user behavior.
Monitor Commerce Server Performance Counters
Review the list of Commerce Server performance counters. Start by adding the counters from this list to the System Monitor. You can add other counters later.
See Also
Other Resources
Monitoring Commerce Server Sites