Monitoring & Profiling with NewRelic RPM

I've used a variety of tools for system monitoring during load and performance testing, but one that's impressed me lately is RPM by NewRelic, which profiles Java and Ruby web applications. It's extremely lightweight and generates a lot of useful load and performance data. I used it on a website that used Tomcat as the application server and MySQL on the backend, and RPM was able to point out some database bottlenecks pretty quickly. It's especially good at aggregating data from multiple application servers, which can be a colossal pain to monitor individually. The obvious disadvantage over local profiler apps is firewall access. RPM is a SaaS, so if you're testing in a lab without external access for the RPM agent, you're out of luck.

That said, some of the useful data reported by RPM include:

Response times (including breakdowns of total page response time into how much time the JVM, database call, and external services accounted for in that total).
CPU and RAM usage by the Tomcat JVM process
Total throughput
Historic data
Apdex (which is a metric I've not used before, but is a nice way to quantify performance)
Suggestions for optimizing your site

NewRelic has a demo session running against a sample application running in an Amazon EC2 environment, so you can see live data.

https://rpm.newrelic.com/guest_access

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http://rpm.newrelic.com