Meet Graphdat

There are various monitoring tools in the area of server management - ranging from UNIX-tools like top to online services like New Relic. Graphdat belongs in the last group - the online monitoring services - with one major difference: Graphical presentation of performance is almost instant, as in real time with a few seconds delay. This makes the tool excellent for monitoring server issues.

For instance, when a certain cronjob is being run, or when a certain database-index is being refreshed (like Joomla!s Finder-tables), performance might spike. It is important to analyse which resources in utiilized in which way. Does the CPU-usage go up to 100%? Or is it that the server is swapping? Using tools like top and free you get the same insight as well, but if you are an UNIX expert. Graphdat gives out this information for anyone to understand. Really great stuff.

Joomla! plugins feeding Graphdat

Now, the main graphs of Graphdat can be extended using simple API-calls, and this allows a Graphdat user to zoom into a certain application request, and see which part of that request eats the most resources. With our Joomla! plugin, various Joomla! events are tracked, so you can determine whether resources are eaten up before or after the component has been initialized, before or after the template is asked for output. Everything is tracked through Joomla! plugin-events like onAfterInitialise, so it requires you to know a bit more about the Joomla! architecture - but when analysing Joomla! performance at a developer level, this knowledge is required anyway.

Things get cooler when you add in the MageBridge plugin for Graphdat - assuming you are using MageBridge anyway. A frequent question when running MageBridge-based e-commerce sites is which application is consuming the most resources? Magento or Joomla!? Simply by enabling the plugin, you get your answer. All performance that goes to the event buildMageBridge is actually spent on Magento. If that area is slow, Magento needs optimization, not Joomla!.

The Joomla! plugin is available for free on our site. The MageBridge-specific add-on is available through the MageBridge Update Manager (which requires an active support subscription). Hope you enjoy this as much as we do.

Installing Graphdat on your server?

Do you want to install Graphdat on your own Linux server, but you don't know how? Yireo comes to the rescue. Just ask us for a quote, and we'll get you up and running.