Monitoring Jenkins Performance: Key Strategies For Success

Jenkins is a popular automation server that is widely used by software development companies as a vital part of the modern software development life cycle. Performance monitoring is a key part of continuous integration.

There are several ways to monitor Jenkins performance, including:

- Using the 'Monitor' plugin to view the statistics of jobs with respect to system performance and other agents.

- Using JavaMelody, a common answer to the question of how to monitor Jenkins performance.

- Using JMeter, an open-source performance testing tool, in conjunction with Jenkins.

- Using the Performance Plugin, which displays statistics, trends and can be used to mark builds as failed based on results.

Jenkins Monitoring Plugin

The Jenkins Monitoring Plugin allows for the monitoring of Jenkins performance with JavaMelody. The plugin provides charts of memory, CPU, system load average, and HTTP response times by day, week, month, year, or custom period. It also provides statistics of HTTP requests with mean response times, mean CPU times, and mean response size by request and by day, week, month, year, or custom period. The monitoring plugin can be installed by point and click in the plugin manager of a Jenkins server, or it can be downloaded from the Jenkins website.

The Build Monitor View plugin provides a highly visible view of the status of selected Jenkins jobs. It displays the status and progress of selected jobs, which are updated automatically every few seconds using AJAX. It also displays the names of people who might be responsible for "breaking the build" and supports the Claim plugin, so that users can see who is fixing a broken build. The Build Monitor plugin can be installed by point and click in the plugin manager of a Jenkins server, or it can be downloaded from the Jenkins website.

Jenkins Performance Plugin

The Jenkins Performance Plugin provides performance trend reports and facilitates the running and reporting of performance tests. It can be used to publish performance test result reports and run performance tests using Taurus.

The plugin supports a wide range of performance report file formats, including JMeter, Taurus, JUnit, Locust, and more. It offers various configuration options, such as specifying source data files, baseline builds, comparison modes, and threshold settings.

Additionally, the plugin integrates with Jenkins Pipeline, allowing users to incorporate performance testing and reporting into their continuous integration and delivery workflows.

The Performance Plugin for Jenkins CI is available on GitHub, where users can find detailed documentation and contribute to the project.

Jenkins and JMeter

Jenkins is a platform that allows users to integrate all JMeter tests in their pipeline process and better understand the details of their applications. JMeter is a tool that can be used to test the performance of static sites, dynamic sites, and complete web applications. It can also simulate a heavy load on a server, allowing for strength testing and performance analysis.

There are several benefits to using JMeter with Jenkins, including unattended test execution for each system, build failure logs and recovery steps, secure and easy access to test reports of each build, and automation of routine work.

To use JMeter with Jenkins, follow these steps:

• Install the Performance plugin on Jenkins.
• Install JMeter on your system.
• Create a JMeter test plan using a GUI or terminal commands.
• Run JMeter from the command line.
• Execute JMeter from Jenkins by creating a new item, selecting the build environment, and adding a post-build action.
• View the JMeter report data from the Console Output in Jenkins.

By integrating JMeter with Jenkins, users can automate performance testing, access comprehensive graphs, and easily analyze key performance indicators such as throughput, response time, and errors.

JavaMelody

To install and enable JavaMelody, follow these steps:

• From the Jenkins dashboard, click “Manage Jenkins”.
• Scroll down to select “Manage Plugins”.
• Select the “Available” tab.
• Select the plugin called "Monitoring".
• Install the plugin and restart your Jenkins server.

Once installed, you can access the monitoring dashboard by visiting http://jenkins-ip/monitoring. To view the report for all your nodes, visit http://jenkins-ip/monitoring/nodes. Across the different web pages of the monitoring dashboard, you can find various metrics, including threads, current HTTP requests, process list, HTTP sessions, build queue length, build time by period, memory and CPU usage charts, errors, logs, and all metrics exposed by MBeans.

The Monitoring plugin provides monitoring for Jenkins with JavaMelody. On the Jenkins dashboard, click on "Manage Jenkins", then click on "Monitoring of Jenkins master". It will open the statistics for Jenkins instance monitoring. You can also click on "Other charts" and see other details related to Garbage Collector time, Thread count, and so on. Scroll down the page and find the statistics for the system errors logs. To get more information, click on the "Details" link of any section.

ALM Vitality

Jenkins components that can be monitored include physical and virtual hosts, masters and slaves, queues, executors, jobs, IT resources (memory, CPU, network, storage, etc.), the web application, and the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

The Jenkins 'Monitor' plugin provides statistics on jobs with respect to system performance and other agents. This includes build executions per minute, build mean times, the percentage of build errors per day, used memory, CPU utilization, running builds, build queue length, and waiting time in the build queue.

The benefits of using ALM Vitality include:

• Monitoring of stuck jobs and dependencies
• Monitoring of the Jenkins web application
• Monitoring of the Java Virtual Machine
• Monitoring of host alive status, Jenkins service process, port listening, and storage capacity
• Monitoring of masters and slaves connectivity, the amount of online executors, and queue length
• Monitoring of lack of memory and CPU

Frequently asked questions