Monitor Performance of the Laserfiche Server
One of the roles of the Laserfiche Administrator is to make sure that the system is running optimally all the time, in order to make sure that employees are being able to efficiently perform their assigned job tasks. Here is a way to monitor performance across your Laserfiche system including Laserfiche Server, SQL database and associated hardware.
What is performance monitoring?
Performance monitoring includes all of the following:
- Measuring the efficiency of various Laserfiche hardware and software components
- Collecting data from key metrics at regular intervals over a period of time
- Analyzing this data to find patterns, relationships and anomalies
What are some benefits of monitoring performance?
Regularly monitoring your Laserfiche performance will allow you to:
- Quickly diagnose and address issues that are causing bottlenecks
- Notice if there are periods that are particularly heavy in activity, allowing you to increase efficiency by scheduling certain tasks, such as Indexing or OCR, at different times
- Determine if there is a need for additional user licenses or extra hardware
What are some tools for performance monitoring?
The Microsoft Performance Monitor, accessed from the “Administrative Tools” section of the Control Panel, is the best way to monitor and measure the performance of various hardware and software components (including your SQL database and Laserfiche). It also allows you to create performance logs using counters (one counter corresponding to a single aspect of a specific system). There are Windows, Laserfiche and SQL Server specific counters available for use in logs.
Windows-Specific Counters can be used to monitor performance objects related to various hardware and operating system features. Some examples include:
- %Processor Time – how much of the processor time is taken with executing a task as opposed to being idle
- Pages/sec – the rate at which pages are read from or written to a disk
- Available Bytes – the amount of physical memory immediately available to allocate to a process
SQL Server-Specific Counters can be used to monitor performance objects related to your SQL database. Some examples include:
- Batch Requests/sec – the rate at which the server receives SQL batch requests
- Index Searches/sec – the rate at which index searches are performed
- Active Transactions – the number of active update transactions for the database
Laserfiche-Specific Counters are used to trace performance objects specific to your Laserfiche system including your Laserfiche Server, Laserfiche repositories, Laserfiche Full Text Search (LFFTS) Catalog and Laserfiche Full Text Search (LFFTS) Server. Some examples include:
Laserfiche Server-Specific Counters
- Named User Licenses – the number of named user licenses currently being used
- Read-Only Sessions – the number of read-only sessions connected to the server
Laserfiche Repository-Specific Counters
- Entries Created/sec – the number of entries created per second for the repository
- Total Sessions – the total number of sessions logged into the repository
LFFTS Catalog-Specific Counters
- Concurrent searches – the number of concurrent searches being performed
- Time since last searched – the time that has elapsed since the last search
LFFTS Server-Specific Counters
- Documents indexed per second – the number of documents indexed per second on the search engine
- Pages indexed per second – the number of pages indexed per second on the search engine
More detailed information about Microsoft Performance Monitor can be found in the Using Microsoft Performance Monitor with Laserfiche white paper as well as the Laserfiche product help files.
You can create a performance log out of any combination of Windows-Specific, SQL Server-Specific and Laserfiche-Specific counters:
The log is a graphical representation of your system performance and allows you to visualize patterns, trends, relationships and anomalies over a specified time period, helping you in turn to optimize your Laserfiche functionality.
