Section has always been committed to providing the best, most detailed metrics and logs to our users. As the only Content Delivery solution that integrates fully with agile development and DevOps practices, we recognize the importance of having accurate metrics to diagnose, resolve and continuously improve your website performance and security. That’s why we’re happy to announce that we have recently given our metrics an update by bringing in Grafana, which is a highly flexible graphing tool that charts the metrics we provide from Graphite.
Content Delivery Metrics in Grafana
Grafana allows users to easily see vital metrics for Varnish Cache, ModSecurity, and other reverse proxies in their Section stack. We’ve created five Grafana dashboards in the Section portal to get you started, and users can also create their own custom metrics dashboards to get a specific view of their application. Here are the default dashboards every Section user will see in the Section portal:
Traffic Summary: The Traffic Summary provides an overview of your website’s traffic, including HTTP requests and bytes served per minute. You can also view the HTTP requests by status code so you can see if there are high server or client side error codes. Our flexible alerting tool also allows you to set up alerts if error codes go up.
Metrics for your Installed Proxies
Varnish Cache Metrics
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Varnish Metrics Overview: This dashboard goes into detail on the hit, miss, pass ratios of Varnish Cache to help you see how Varnish Cache is handling each of your requests. These metrics give you a good understanding of how much content you are serving from the cache. You want to aim for a high percentage of cache hit rates - for example, a 98% cache hit rate would mean 98% of requests are being served from the cache, therefore they are being served more quickly and are not reaching your origin server.
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Varnish Request Performance Metrics: The “Varnish Request Performance” dashboard gives you data on time to serve and bandwidth by hit type, content type, and response type. This enables you to see the impact a cache hit has on the speed content is delivered and shows you what type of content takes the longest to serve. This dashboard is particularly useful for deciding what type of content you should focus on caching.
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Hit Rates by Content Type: In the “Varnish Cache Hit Rates” dashboard you can see cache hits by content type: HTML, Images, CSS, JavaScript. This is important because it will allow you to see if you are caching various content types successfully: if you are able to cache HTMl documents, for example, you will see a very fast Time to First Byte and reduced load on your server.
ModSecurity Metrics
If you have ModSecurity installed, the ModSecurity statistics dashboard shows the total amount of traffic that went through ModSecurity, your most active rules and most active countries. See immediately which countries are tripping which which rules on your WAF and how frequently.
PageSpeed Metrics
For users of the PageSpeed Front End Optimization module, Section will display PageSpeed metrics seen on their website, including information on what resources were not able to be rewritten, JavaScript minification failures, and other failures which allow users to ensure their files can be properly optimized.
Learn more about logs and metrics
In addition to detailed metrics, Section also provides a full set of logs from Kibana that allow you to troubleshoot issues in real time. To learn more about Section’s DevOps friendly Edge Compute Platform and see a demo, contact us or sign up for your own account.
