Monitoring Best Practices

Article ID:360027734172
2 minute readKnowledge base

Issue

  • Best Practices for monitoring Jenkins instance performance.

  • Which Application Performance Management (APM) software should I use for monitoring CloudBees CI?

Environment

Resolution

CloudBees CI monitoring capabilities rely on exploding Jenkins Metrics plugin which exposes a set a metrics including: System and Java Virtual Machine metrics, Web UI metrics and Jenkins specific metrics. Other plugins might add additional metrics like the Metrics Disk Usage plugin.

Depending on where you explode those metrics from, the following options are available:

1. Inside the CloudBees CI

Using CloudBees Monitoring plugin (Proprietary) for alerting and Jenkins Monitoring plugin (Community) for reporting.

Reference to this blog post: Troubleshooting Jenkins Performance: Kubernetes Edition - Part 2 to extend information on this topic (The content of that blog post is also applicable for CloudBees CI Traditional)

2. Outside the CloudBees CI

2.1 CloudBees Analytics

CloudBees Analytics provides out-of-the-box real-time insights to help monitor, measure, and optimize your CI builds and infrastructure. With these new actionable insights, you can enhance your build performance, right-size your workloads over demand cycles, prevent unplanned downtimes, get a holistic view of your plugin usage across all your pipeline jobs, and lots more.

2.2 Third-party alternatives

Depending on how you explode those metrics, the following options are available:

2.2.1 Enabling JMX

Java 8 Monitoring and Management Using JMX Technology

See this configuration example [Monitoring CloudBees CI on Modern with Datadog

CloudBees Docs](https://docs.cloudbees.com/docs/cloudbees-ci/latest/cloud-monitoring-guide/datadog).
2.2.2 Tier 3 plugins

For monitoring Jenkins metrics and events:

For monitoring Jenkins logs and build data:

Alternatively, custom data index can be created and pushed to your favortite APM tool like the following example: How to send build data to an Elasticsearch server.

Check support policies for Tier 3 plugins.

Note about JVM Profiling Agents

From our support experience, we have observed in certain scenarios that some External JVM Profiling Agents (it might depends on a specific versions of a agent) could create undesired side effects like System and network overhead.

On the other hand, the data collected by the Java agent will be stored in the Application heap. It is because this kind of agents run as a part of the JVM. While the actual overhead incurred depends on the specificity of the data gathered and the application itself, less than 5% performance overhead is an optimistic general estimate. This fact, needs to be considered when dimensioning nodes which run CloudBees CI application with JVM Agents.

References