Another post for my fading memory, how to install the GD libraries for your Leopard Apache installation running PHP 5.2.5. I will be using these libraries in a forthcoming blog about the use of ‘sparklines‘ to present complex performance monitoring data.
Now on with installation. Thanks to topicdesk for leading the way with detailed OSX 10.5.x server installation instructions. Here’s my own shorthand version …
Read MoreIf you’ve been using a Macbook Pro or similar for some time, you’ll find that their batteries need tender love and care, if they are to go the distance. According to Apple, I fit into the ‘ideal use’ category as I regularly use my notebook on the 1+ hour daily train commute.
However as the recent purchase of a new $199AUD battery has taught me, I often neglect to ‘unplug’ from the charger when weaseling away at work.
ioreg is part of Apple’s I/O Kit Registry, which you can use to determine programatically what the remaining charge of your battery is based on current and max capacity. Using this tool and Growl notifications, I’ve written a quick hack to remind me to unplug whenever my battery charge is greater than 99%.
In working with SiteScope of late, I’ve found that it doesn’t always collect performance metrics the way I want to. More importantly, it can often turn a simple monitoring activity into a complex disaster. Take monitoring via JMX for example. In SiteScope, it has a rather complicated (and sometimes broken) interface when trying to communicate with a busy MBean Server. One can quite easily roll your own JMX monitor using open source tools in about 65 lines of code as I demonstrated here.
But we still all use tools like LoadRunner in these commercial 9-5 contracts right? Wouldn’t it be nice, if you could roll your own custom monitors in Ruby, Perl or whatever language you like, store that data in a simple repository, let’s say a MySQL database, and still be able to hook into those metrics from a LoadRunner Controller during test execution!?
It is possible, with one PHP file and a simple WAMP (or LAMP) installation all wrapped up in a SiteScope-like alternative.
Read MoreAfter getting nowhere with lack luster HP support, I turned to the power of the Open Source community and got a very simple script up and running to remotely monitor Weblogic JVM Performance and JMS queues using JMX and JRuby.
Despite having some initial issues with the code, the author of the jmx4r module turned around a fix inside 24 hours so that I could connect to a Weblogic 9.2 server and look at its domainruntime MBeans. SiteScope can’t handle domainruntimes of these size (short of being told to ‘add more memory’ to a 3GB+ machine!). So exit stage left Mercury, enter stage right JRuby…
Read MoreI quite literally stole this idea from Charlie at PerformanceEngineering in which he posted a response to a challenge by Dmitry on how to get regular expressions up and running within LoadRunner.
I’m a huge fan of regex, and thanks to these guys, now have a way of implementing at least pattern matching with LoadRunner. Ideally I’d like to be able to include pattern matching & replacing, like Ruby or Perl does in one line but for now am happy for pattern matching.
Read on for the changes I made to Charlies code to abstract matching functionality and call it as a function within other LoadRunner actions.
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