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Managing web server performance

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You work for a large retailer that relies on Apache servers to support its ecommerce. Your organization is growing quickly and you have some concerns about your infrastructure and its ability to keep up with customer demand. You'd like to create some searches to monitor performance and be able to correlate that information with usage. You can use Splunk software to track page performance, including response codes and times, and to track user data, including geographic location and user activity. Alerts from Splunk can be used to signal conditions that require action on the part of the Web Server Administrator, such as troubleshooting or performance optimizations.

How to use Splunk software for this use case

You can run many searches with Splunk software to manage a web server. Depending on what information you have available, you might find it useful to identify some or all of the following:

Website performance

Synthetic performance checks

User activity

Additional data points

Results

To maximize their benefit, the how-to articles linked in the previous section likely need to tie into existing processes at your organization or become new standard processes. These processes commonly impact success with this use case:

  • Dynamic web content comes from a combination of business logic and database tables. Monitoring the application server functions, such as log in, checkout, and form submission, as well as database performance, is necessary to get an end-to-end view of the responsible processes.
  • Monitoring the infrastructure that supports the web and app servers to prevent additional problems that might affect the user experience with your web content. You might want to track metrics such as percent busy for compute and storage usage.
  • Monitoring the quality of the content available on your websites. For example, are files up to date? Are broken links found and quickly corrected? Are the certificates current?

Measuring impact and benefit is critical to assessing the value of IT operations. The following are example metrics that can be useful to monitor when implementing this use case:

  • Response time: A reduction in outliers for the time taken by a server to deliver content to the requesting client.
  • Count: A reduction in error status codes.
  • Performance: A reduction in performance problems correlated with user load.

Additional resources

This use case is also included in the IT Essentials Learn app, which provides more information about how to implement the use case successfully in your IT maturity journey. In addition, these Splunk resources might help you understand and implement this use case:

Splunk OnDemand Services: Use these credit-based services for direct access to Splunk technical consultants with a variety of technical services from a pre-defined catalog. Most customers have OnDemand Services per their license support plan. Engage the ODS team at ondemand@splunk.com if you would like assistance.