ApplicationDashboard

Weekend project which will hopefully receive some more attention in due time.

Intent was to write a simple stats application that can be used to profile our load-testing applications and provide external feedback on performance. This can be done by either querying the stats server directly (e.g. with curl piped to JSON formatter, or by using the dashboard, or alternately by creating a simple console application).

I've found some inspiration from statusdashboard and the node.js metrics module. Unfortunately they both weren't exactly what I needed. Additionally most dashboards that I looked at only ran on *nix machines and required graphite which looks awsome, but doesn't run on windows.

ApplicationDashboard is made up of 3 modules: Stats, Collector, and Webserver.

• Stats module allows for simple application profiling and hosts a http server that will return a stats summary on request. Summary is returned in JSON.
• Collector module can be configured to query a stats server at pre-configured intervals, and on receipt of data call a callback with latest summary information.
• Webserver hosts a simple dashboard, creates a collector that connects to stats server, and will then push updates (via socket.io broadcast) to the dashboard.

Stats module

Currently only supports the following 2 metrics:

• Counter - inc, dec and reset a counter value
• Timer - Measures the time taken to complete a process/function/task/database call/etc and increments a counter for each measurement taken.
  Returns Count, Min, Max, Ave, and MaxInfo. Where MaxInfo can be used to identify the task that took the longest.

Examples

• See the examples folder for examples on how to create and use the modules.

• See comments and examples in code.

• See minimal example below:

    var dash = require ('ApplicationDashboard')
  
    // ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    // Listen on port 9090, and reply stats summary on any request received.
    var stats = dash.stats.createServer(9090);
  
    // ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    // Create 2 counters: numLogins and gamesPlayed
    stats.addCounter('numLogins', 'Player Logins').inc(5);
    
    var gamesPlayed = stats.addCounter('gamesPlayed', 'Games Played');
    gamesPlayed.inc(53);
    gamesPlayed.reset();
    gamesPlayed.inc();
  
    // ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    // Create a timer: loginTime
    // - then measure loginTime for 'player 1'
    // - then measure loginTime for 'player 2'
    var loginTime = stats.addTimer('loginTime', 'Player Login Time');
  
    var thisTimer = loginTime.start('player 1');
    setTimeout(function() {thisTimer.stop();}, 1500);
  
    var thisTimer2 = loginTime.start('player 2');
    setTimeout(function() {thisTimer2.stop();}, 500);
  
    // ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    // Configure webport to 7080, 
    // - set collector update interval to 5 seconds, 
    // - set stats server url as localhost:9090
    dash.WebServer(7080).startCollector(5000, { hostname: 'localhost', port: 9090});
  

  • Test stats server using curl and json-command for readable formatting.

      curl http://localhost:9090/ 2> null | json
    

Note: The dashboard.html file currently relies on the server to be configured to port 7080. If this is changed, then update the socket.io URL to new port (inside dashboard.html).

Todo

• Lots :)

• Will add features as required.

• Need to find a better way to manage/create/host the public webserver folder.

• Allow Timer.stop(...text here...) function to add text to result. For example:

    var myTimer = timer.start('Login xyz.');
    ...
    myTimer.stop('Failed with err: blabla');
  

npm install from github repo

npm install https://github.com/HeikoR/ApplicationDashboard/archive/master.tar.gz

Then you can run test script by calling the following:

require('ApplicationDashboard\\examples\\create-simple-webserver');