Part 1 of this four-part series introduced the Adobe Coldfusion 8 Server Monitor, with a focus on valuable features for CFML code development. In this second part, I'll focus on using the tool in production. The Server Monitor brings unique benefits and solutions to challenges related to performance and configuration. It's worth repeating: Whether you're a CFML developer or a ColdFusion Server administrator, you can find tremendous value from the new ColdFusion 8 Server Monitor. I hope to show you in this series that the Server Monitor (and its related features) is much more than just something to leave turned on in a network operations center to view availability charts and graphs. It provides unprecedented insight into underlying operations of the ColdFusion server.

In part 1, I introduced you to the Monitor, showing such basics as how to start the Monitor and how to use the Monitor interface. I also discussed the three Start buttons (monitoring, profiling, and memory tracking), and I made the very important point that you can get value from the Monitor even if you enable none of these buttons. Even so, each option enables additional functionality and information reported in the Monitor, and I highlighted several of the reports (and drill-downs and charts) that provide info that could help during CFML development, such as tracking shared scope memory utilization, slowest tags or function calls, largest variables in a request, JVM memory usage, cached queries, and finally large, slow, and frequent queries.

In this article, I'll introduce additional features of the Monitor, mostly focused on additional monitoring reports that can be especially valuable in managing a production ColdFusion environment. Finally, I'll discuss a powerful new ability to abort troublesome requests or threads to recoup valuable system resources.

Let me reiterate as well: The split of functionality I offer between development and production functionality in the Server Monitor is rather arbitrary, as features discussed here apply just as usefully to development, and vice versa. The next part of this series will cover additional features of value to production administrators: Alerts and Snapshots. The final part will cover the MultiServer Monitor and a few miscellaneous topics related to the Monitor.

Check out the other parts of the ColdFusion 8 server monitoring series:

• Part 1: Using the Server Monitor in development
• Part 3: Automated monitoring and request management with Alerts and Snapshots
• Part 4: Multiserver Monitor, Admin API monitoring, and more

Requirements

In order to make the most of this article, you need the following software and files:

ColdFusion 8 (Enterprise or Developer version)

• Try
• Buy

Prerequisites:

Readers should have some experience with coding or managing a ColdFusion server.

Also, read Part 1 before reading Part 2.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License

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