Resource monitoring capabilities

With Rational® Test Automation Server, you can monitor a host or a service that you add to a project as a source. You can select the statistics counters that are used to collect metrics and the resource usage data throughout the monitoring system. You can visualize metrics and data that are gathered during the monitoring process in Rational® Test Automation Server.

Requirements:
  • You must be a Team Space Owner to create, modify and remove resource monitoring sources in a team space. Any team space Member (not owner) can only view resource monitoring sources.
  • You must be a project Owner to create, modify and remove resource monitoring sources in a project. Any project Member (not the owner) can only view resource monitoring sources.
Supported sources
With IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server, you can monitor resources for the following sources:
  • Apache httpd server: You can optionally use agents.
  • NGINX and NGINX Plus: You can optionally use agents.
  • Java Virtual Machine: You can optionally use agents.

    You can monitor JVM resources from a local or a remote system. Some parameters must be set in the command before running the Java Virtual Machine. For more details, see the link to the page about starting a Java Virtual Machine on this page.

  • Windows Performance host:

    To monitor the performance of a Windows host, you must have installed an agent on the target Windows host

    or on a Windows host that is configured to access the performance data of the Windows host target.

  • Linux Performance host:

    To monitor the performance of a Linux host, you must have installed an agent on the target Linux host.

  • Docker host:

    A resource monitoring agent is mandatory to get a Docker data collector. The Docker host source is added to the list of resource monitoring data collectors when the agent is installed.

  • Prometheus server:

    You can monitor metrics of a host under test that are collected by a Prometheus server. Prometheus collects metrics from monitored targets by regularly requesting appropriate HTTP endpoints on these targets (called scraping).

    The metrics data are collected through data collectors sets (groups of monitoring counters) that are tracking the system performance. The performance data results are stored in the Prometheus database so that they can be consumed by external systems through a REST API.

    In Rational® Test Automation Server, you can query these performance metrics collected by Prometheus servers. 'PromQL' is the language for querying Prometheus metric data. Refer to Prometheus PromQL documentation for information about this query language.

    You can select default queries, or create additional ones.

    A Prometheus server is required. It must be configured to scrap a set of exporters, every 15 seconds by default. Pushgateway, service discovery, and Alertmanager are optional.

    If Rational® Test Automation Server cannot directly reach the Prometheus server, you can consider setting up an agent on an authorized host or on the same host that is running Prometheus.

  • OpenMetrics exporter:

    You can monitor the metrics of a host under test that are collected and exposed through an OpenMetrics format or a Prometheus exporter format.

    Rational® Test Automation Server can scrap metrics exposed by an OpenMetrics or Prometheus exporter through metric counters. No Prometheus server installation is required, you only need to set up one or multiple OpenMetrics, or Prometheus exporters that fit your software or host target.

    If Rational® Test Automation Server cannot directly reach the Prometheus server, you can consider setting up an agent on an authorized host or on the same host that is running Prometheus.