Hardware Resources Metrics

This page describes the basic hardware metrics collected by the Machine Agent and the additional metrics collected by the Machine Agent for Server Visibility. Not all of the metrics that appear in the Hardware Resources branch of the Metric Browser tree are provided by the Machine Agent; some are collected by the Database Agent and are used in the Database Monitoring UI, while others might be custom metrics added by another extension run by your Machine Agent.

For most metrics in the Metric Browser, you can select any point in the graph to view more information about the metric observed at that point in time. The information includes the metric identifier, date and time of the observation, along with any of the following values relevant to the metric:

Obs (observed value): Average of all data points seen for that interval. For a cluster or a time rollup, this represents the weighted average across nodes or over time.
Min: Minimum data point value seen for that interval.
Max: Maximum data point value seen for that interval.
Sum: Sum of all data point values seen for that interval. For the Percentile Metric for the App Agent for Java, this is the result of the percentile value multiplied by the Count.
Count: Number of data points generated for the metric in that interval. The collection interval for infrastructure metrics varies by environment.

CPU Metrics

Metric Name	Description	Basic or Server Visibility	Default Monitoring Mode ³
%Idle	Percentage of time the CPU was idle; the CPU had completed its tasks and has nothing to do.	Basic	KPI
%Busy	Percentage of time the CPU was busy processing system or user requests; this metric includes CPU Stolen time.	Basic	KPI
%Stolen ⁴	Usually, stolen time is the percentage of time a virtual CPU waits for a real CPU while the hypervisor is servicing another virtual processor.	Basic	KPI
%Nice	Percentage of CPU time spent on low priority processes.	Server Visibility	Advanced
System	Percentage of time the CPU was busy processing kernel code.	Server Visibility	KPI
User	Percentage of time the CPU was busy processing non-kernel code.	Server Visibility	KPI
IOWait	Percentage of CPU time spent waiting for an I/O request.	Server Visibility	KPI
%Irq	Percentage of CPU time spent servicing hardware interrupts.	Server Visibility	Diagnostic
%SoftIrq	Percentage of CPU time spent servicing software interrupts.	Server Visibility	Advanced
%Busy 95th Percentile ²	The CPU %Busy percentage was at this level or lower 95% of the time.	Server Visibility	KPI
IOWait 95th Percentile ²	The CPU %Busy percentage was at this level or lower 95% of the time.	Server Visibility	KPI

¹See Linux Kernel Processes.

² See Percentile Metric Reporting must be Enabled.

³ See Default Monitoring Mode.

⁴ See Stolen Times are Reported Differently.

Memory Metrics

Metric Name	Description	Basic or Server Visibility	Linux¹	Default Monitoring Mode³
Total (MB)	The total amount of memory.	Basic		KPI
Used %	The percentage of memory used.	Basic	⁴	KPI
Used (MB)	The amount of memory used.	Basic	⁴	Advanced
Free %	Percentage of free or unused memory available for processes.	Basic	⁴	Advanced
Free (MB)	The total amount of free or unused memory available for processes.	Basic	⁴	Advanced
Swap Free (MB)	The total amount of free swap space. Reported for each hierarchical group.	Server Visibility		Advanced
Swap Total (MB)	The total amount of allocated swap space. Reported for each hierarchical group.	Server Visibility		KPI
Swap Used (MB)	The amount of swap space used. Reported for each hierarchical group.	Server Visibility		Advanced
Swap Used %	The percentage of available swap space used. Reported for each hierarchical group.	Server Visibility		KPI
Swap Free %	Percentage of free swap space. Reported for each hierarchical group.	Server Visibility		Advanced
Pages Paged In 95th Percentile ²	The paging-in rate to memory was at this level or lower 95% of the time.	Server Visibility		KPI
Pages Paged Out 95th Percentile ²	The paging-out rate from memory was at this level or lower 95% of the time.	Server Visibility		KPI
Pages Swapped In 95th Percentile ²	The swapping rate of pages from disks was at this level or lower 95% of the time.	Server Visibility		KPI
Pages Swapped Out 95th Percentile ²	The swapping rate of pages to disks was at this level or lower 95% of the time.	Server Visibility		KPI

¹ See Linux Kernel Processes.

² See Percentile Metric Reporting must be Enabled.

³See Default Monitoring Mode.

⁴ See Configure Free/Used Memory Metric Calculation on Linux.

Disk and Partition Metrics

The agent reports metrics for each disk partition and for disks in aggregate. Only mounted partitions and local partitions are reported.

SIGAR is not supported on Machine Agent.

Metric Name	Description	Basic or Server Visibility	Windows	Linux	AIX	Default Monitoring Mode¹
KB read/sec	The number of KB per second read from all disks and partitions.	Basic				Advanced
KB written/sec	The average amount of data per second written to all disks and partitions.	Basic				Advanced
Reads/sec	Number of read operations per second performed on all disks and partitions.	Basic				KPI
Writes/sec	Number of write operations per second performed on all disk and partitions.	Basic			5	KPI
Avg IO Utilization (%)	The average time spent processing read/write requests on all disks and partitions as a percentage of the total reported time window. Databases often report high disk I/O utilization due to frequent read/write requests. For example, if the agent detects read/write processing in 55 out of 60 seconds, the Avg IO Utilization for that minute is 92%. This metric does not measure the amount of available disk space or read/write request sizes.	Server Visibility				KPI
<partition> %CPU Time	The percentage of CPU processing consumed by a partition during read and write operations.	Basic (HardwareMonitor)⁶				Diagnostic
<partition> Avg Service Time (ms)	Time in milliseconds spent performing read and write operations across one partition.	Basic (HardwareMonitor)⁶				Diagnostic
<partition> Avg Queue Time (ms)	Time in milliseconds that a read or write request is in the queue before it gets processed across one partition.	Basic (HardwareMonitor)⁶				KPI
<partition> KB read/sec	The average amount of data per second read from one specific partition.	Basic (HardwareMonitor)⁶				Diagnostic
<partition> KB written/sec	The average amount of data per second written to one specific partition.	Basic (HardwareMonitor)⁶				Diagnostic
<partition> Reads/sec	Number of read operations per second performed on one specific partition.	Basic (HardwareMonitor)⁶				KPI
<partition> Writes/sec	Number of write operations per second performed on one specific partition.	Basic (HardwareMonitor)⁶			5	KPI
<partition> Space Available	The amount of unused or free disk space on a specific partition in KB.	Basic (HardwareMonitor)⁶		⁴		KPI
<partition> Space Used	The amount of used or unavailable disk space on a specific partition in KB.	Basic (HardwareMonitor)⁶		⁴		Advanced
<partition> Avg IO Utilization (%)	The average time spent processing read/write requests as a percentage of the total reported time window. Databases often report high disk I/O utilization due to frequent read/write requests. For example, if the agent detects read/write processing in 55 out of 60 seconds, the Avg IO Utilization for that minute is 92%. This metric does not measure the amount of available disk space or read/write request sizes.	Server Visibility				KPI
<partition> Avg read time (ms)	The average time in milliseconds required to service a read request by all disks or by one specific disk or across one partition.	Server Visibility	²			KPI
<partition> Avg write time (ms)	The average time in milliseconds required to service a write request across one partition.	Server Visibility	²			KPI
<partition> Queue Time 95th Percentile ³	The queue time for read/write requests was this long or shorter 95% of the time for the reported time window.	Server Visibility				KPI

¹ See Default Monitoring Mode.

²For some versions of Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista, the Hardware Resources|Disks|<partition>|Avg Read Time (ms) and Hardware Resources|Disks|<partition>|Avg Write Time (ms) metrics will be reported as 0. This is due to a known bug with Windows. To resolve this issue, download the hotfix: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/961435.

³ See Percentile Metric Reporting must be Enabled.

⁴ See Configure Disk Usage Metric Collection on Linux.

⁵See HardwareMonitor and JavaHardwareMonitor Calculate "Writes/Sec" Differently on AIX Machines

⁶For Basic (HardwareMonitor) metrics, the following variables must be set as:

<MA-Home>/monitors/JavaHardwareMonitor: false
<MA-Home>/monitors/HardwareMonitor: true
<MA-Home>/extensions/ServerMonitoring/conf/ServerMonitoring.yaml: Set basicEnabled to true

Volume Metrics

AppDynamics Server Visibility retrieves the volume space metrics on POSIX systems using the df command. The volume metrics are reported across all listed volumes and for each volume at a specified mount point, such as "/boot". Only local volumes are reported.

Metric Name	Description	Basic or Server Visibility	Default Monitoring Mode³
Total (MB)	The amount of storage space available (used and free) across all listed volumes or at the specified mount point. On Linux, the space reserved for root is not counted in the available space.	Server Visibility	KPI
Free (MB)	The amount of unused or free space across all listed volumes or on the selected volume at the specified mount point. On Linux, the space reserved for root is not counted in the available space.	Server Visibility	Advanced (volume)
Used (MB)	The amount of storage space in use across all listed volumes or on the selected volume at the specified mount point.	Server Visibility	Advanced (volume)
Used (%)	The percentage of storage space in use across all listed volumes or on the selected volume at the specified mount point.	Server Visibility	KPI
Count	The number of partitions for which storage space metrics are collected.	Server Visibility	KPI
<partition> Free (MB)	The amount of unused or free space for <partition>.	Server Visibility	KPI
<partition> Total (MB)	The amount of storage space available (used and free) for <partition>.	Server Visibility	KPI
<partition> Used (%)	The percentage of storage space in use for <partition>.	Server Visibility	KPI
<partition> Used (MB)	The amount of storage space in use for <partition>.	Server Visibility	Advanced

¹Only /dev volumes are monitored on Linux.

²Only /dev/dsk and /rpool volumes are monitored on Solaris.

³ See Default Monitoring Mode.

Load Metrics

The load metrics are reported for each machine. The CPU % (reported as part of the basic Machine Agent metrics) is the percentage of the CPU consumed by processes that are currently running. Load takes into account processes that are waiting to run. These metrics are shown as percentages in the Server Dashboard and are scaled by 100 in the Metric Browser.

Metric Name	Description	Basic or Server Visibility	Default Monitoring Mode¹
Last 1 minute	CPU Load, presented as an average over the last 1 minute.	Server Visibility	KPI
Last 5 minutes	CPU Load, presented as an average over the last 5 minutes.	Server Visibility	KPI
Last 15 minutes	CPU Load, presented as an average over the last 15 minutes.	Server Visibility	KPI

¹ See Default Monitoring Mode.

Machine Metrics

Metric Name

Description

Basic or Server Visibility

Windows

Linux

Solaris

AIX

Default Monitoring Mode¹

Availability

The percentage of time the Machine Agent was reporting to the Controller. In the Server Visibility UI, this provides a percentage with 6 digits of precision (for example, 100.0000) to measure availability. The Machine Agent sends a heartbeat to the AppDynamics Controller once per minute to indicate the agent is reporting.

Reported for each machine.

Server Visibility

KPI

¹See Default Monitoring Mode.

Network Metrics

The Machine Agent is configured to ignore virtual networks by default. See Machine Agent Settings for Server Visibility.

Metric Name	Description	Basic or Server Visibility	Default Monitoring Mode¹
Incoming KB²	The volume of data received by all monitored network devices.	Basic	Advanced
Incoming KB/sec	The amount of data per second received by all monitored network devices.	Basic	KPI
Incoming packets²	The number of packets received by all monitored network devices.	Basic	Advanced
Incoming packets/sec	The number of data packets per second received by all monitored network devices.	Basic	Advanced
Outgoing KB²	The volume of data sent by all monitored network devices.	Basic	Advanced
Outgoing KB/sec	The volume of data sent per second by all monitored network devices.	Basic	KPI
Outgoing packets²	The number of packets sent by all monitored network devices.	Basic	Advanced
Outgoing packets/sec	The number of data packets sent per second by all monitored network devices.	Basic	Advanced
Incoming Errors/min	The number of incoming packet errors the network incurs every minute.	Server Visibility	KPI
Outgoing Errors/min	The number of outgoing packet errors the network incurs every minute.	Server Visibility	KPI
Avg Utilization (%)	The average network utilization as a percentage of the maximum possible throughput. This metric is not reported if the agent cannot determine the throughput (not supported for some devices and Linux versions). The percentage is rounded to the nearest integer. Therefore, very low utilization may be reported as 0%. Reported for: Servers <group> <network interface>	Server Visibility	KPI
<network interface> Incoming KB	The volume of data received by the selected network interface.	Basic	Advanced
<network interface> Incoming KB/sec	The volume of data received per second by the selected network interface.	Basic	KPI
<network interface> Incoming packets	The number of data packets received by the selected network interface.	Basic	Advanced
<network interface> Incoming packets/sec	The number of data packets received per second by the selected network interface.	Basic	Advanced
<network interface> Outgoing KB	The volume of data sent by the selected network interface.	Basic	Advanced
<network interface> Outgoing KB/sec	The volume of data sent per second by all monitored network interface.	Basic	KPI
<network interface> Outgoing packets	The number of data packets sent per second by the selected network interface.	Basic	Advanced
<network interface> Outgoing packets/sec	The number of data packets sent per second by the selected network interface.	Basic	Advanced
<network interface> Incoming Errors/min	The number of incoming packet errors the network incurs every minute.	Server Visibility	KPI
<network interface> Outgoing Errors/min	The number of outgoing packet errors the network incurs every minute.	Server Visibility	KPI

¹See Default Monitoring Mode.

²The ServerMonitoring and JavaHardwareMonitor extensions calculate unidirectional throughput (packet/KB) metrics differently. ServerMonitoring reports the total number of packets/bytes in the last minute. JavaHardwareMonitor reports the total number of packets/bytes from the time the Machine Agent started.

Process Metrics

The following metrics are aggregated and reported for each process or process class (except Total Process Count, which measures all processes observed by the agent). See Machine Agent Settings for Server Visibility to modify the default process monitoring.

Metric Name	Description	Basic or Server Visibility	Default Monitoring Mode³
Count	The number of processes in this class consuming CPU or memory resources or the total number of processes in this class.	Server Visibility	KPI
CPU Used (%)	Percentage of the CPU bandwidth used by all processes in a process class. A process using 100% CPU is executing on all processors on the system. If there are four cores on the machine and the process is executing four threads, each executing on one core, then the process can use up to 400% CPU. If there are four cores on the machine and the process is executing one thread on one core, then the process can use up to 25% CPU.	Server Visibility	KPI
Major Faults/sec	Number of major page faults caused by all processes in this class.	Server Visibility	Diagnostic
Minor Faults/sec	Number of minor page faults caused by all processes in this class.	Server Visibility	Diagnostic
Memory Used (%)	Percentage of memory consumed by the top 10 consuming processes or the percentage of memory used by all processes in this class.	Server Visibility	KPI
Memory Used (KB)	Amount of memory used by all processes in this class.	Server Visibility	Advanced
Memory Virtual (KB)	Current size of the virtual address space that the process is using. Use of virtual address space does not necessarily imply a corresponding use of either disk or main memory pages. Virtual space is finite and, by using too much, the process can limit its ability to load libraries.	Server Visibility	Advanced
Thread Count	The number of kernel threads used by all processes in this class.	Server Visibility	Diagnostic
Total Process Count	All individual processes observed by the Machine Agent, before it filters out unreported processes and groups the remaining processes into classes. You can use this metric to identify anomalies in the number of processes running on a specific machine. For example, if the average Total Process Count on a machine is usually 200 to 300, and then suddenly rises to 2000 or more, this could indicate a problem on that machine. To collect this metric, the Machine Agent captures the number of processes every 30 seconds and calculates the average number of processes per minute. Observed is the average number of processes per minute. Min and Max are the 30-second buckets with the least and most processes. Count and Sum are the number of process captures each minute and the sum of the processes in each capture for that minute (capture1 + capture2).	Server Visibility	KPI

¹See Linux Kernel Processes.

²When collecting Process metrics on Solaris, the Machine Agent observes and captures only the first 80 characters of each process name and argument list. The agent considers only the first 80 characters of each process string when it applies allowlists ("always monitor this process") and blocklists ("never monitor this process") defined in ServerMonitoring.yml.

³ See Default Monitoring Mode.

Service Availability Metrics

Reported for each service that is configured.

Metric Name	Description	Basic or Server Visibility	Default Monitoring Mode¹
Response Time (ms)	The elapsed time between sending a request and receiving a response from the monitored service.	Server Visibility	KPI
Response Size (bytes)	The size of the response received from the monitored service.	Server Visibility	KPI
Success Rate (%)	The percentage of successful requests over all requests made to the service.	Server Visibility	KPI

¹See Default Monitoring Mode.

Enable Percentile Metric Reporting

You must enable percentile metric reporting on both the Controller and the Machine Agent. By default, reporting is disabled on the Controller and enabled on the Machine Agent.

To enable/disable reporting on the Controller, log in to the Controller Administration Console and set the sim.machines.percentile.percentileMonitoringAllowed property. See Controller Settings for Machine Agents.
To enable/disable reporting on the agent, open the <machine_agent_home>/extensions/ServerMonitoring/conf/ServerMonitoring.yml file and set the percentileEnabled property. See Machine Agent Settings for Server Visibility.

Configure Disk Usage Metric Collection on Linux

You can configure the Linux Machine Agent to calculate the following metrics similar to using the Linux df command:

Servers > Volumes > /opt > Disk Usage
Metric Browser > Disks and Partitions > <partition> > Space Available
Metric Browser > Disks and Partitions > <partition> > Space Used

Linux includes a mechanism for reserving some disk space to ensure that the system remains functioning even if non-privileged users consume all other disk space. By default, these metrics include 5% of reserved space.

By default, the flag -Dappdynamics.machine.agent.extensions.calcVolumeFreeAndUsedWithDfCommand is set to true to reserve 5% of disk space.

To override this default, set -Dappdynamics.machine.agent.extensions.calcVolumeFreeAndUsedWithDfCommand to false.

This feature is supported for Linux versions of the Machine Agent only.

Configure Free/Used Memory Metric Collection on Linux

You can configure how the Machine Agent calculates the amount of free and used memory on Linux machines. By default, the agent calculates any slab-reclaimable memory as used (not free) memory.
To configure the agent to calculate slab-reclaimable memory as free (not used) memory, run Machine Agent with the following command-line argument:
-Dappdynamics.machine.agent.extensions.countSlabReclaimableAsFreeMem=true
This setting affects the following metrics:

Memory Usage (in Server Dashboard)
Memory Used %, Memory Used MB, Memory Free %, and Memory Free MB (in Metric Browser)

Viewing Server Visibility Metrics

You can only view Server Visibility metrics in the Server Visibility version of the Metric Browser. You see this when you access the Metric Browser from the Servers tab in the top navigation bar of the Controller UI.

Machine Agent Versus .NET Machine Agent

If a server has both Machine and .NET Agents installed, there may be differences in metric values reported by the Machine Agent and the .NET Agent due to different averaging rates and measurement methods. See .NET Compatibility Mode.

Streamlined Browsing Mode

The Server Metric Browser includes a Streamlined Browsing option for node metrics. Use this option to browse metrics for tiers that contain multiple nodes.

With Streamlined Browsing enabled, each node in the browser tree view shows only metrics reported by the Machine Agent on the corresponding node.
With Streamlined Browsing enabled, the Hardware Resources and Custom Metrics folders do not display.
With Streamlined Browsing disabled, each node in the browser tree view also shows metrics for other nodes in the same tier (with no indication of the node that corresponds to which tier group).

This streamlining option is not enabled by default. AppDynamics recommends that you enable this option. To enable this option, go to:
http://<controller host>:<port>/controller/admin.jsp and set sim.metrics.metricBrowser.machineMetricMappings.enabled to true.

Streamlined Browsing Enabled	Streamlined Browsing Disabled

Linux Kernel Processes

The Machine Agent has a processSelectorRegex setting that specifies the set of processes monitored by the agent. The default regex filters out most kernel processes on Linux machines. The agent considers monitored processes only when it calculates CPU, Memory, and Process metrics. These metrics may differ from metrics reported by other sources such as Linux commands.

Default Monitoring Mode

The Default Monitoring Mode column indicates the default category of each metric when Dynamic Monitoring Mode (DMM) is enabled. When this mode is enabled, a Machine Agent reports metrics based on the DMM setting on that server:

KPI – Report Key Performance Indicator metrics only
Diagnostic – Report KPI and Diagnostic metrics
Advanced – Report all unfiltered metrics on the Machine Agent.

Load Average Percentages are Scaled by 100 in the Metric Browser

Load Average metrics are shown as float values (such as 0.70 or 1.05) in the Server Dashboard. In the Metric Browser, these metrics are multiplied by 100 to provide two decimal points of precision. If a server has an average load of 7.67, for example, the Server Dashboard shows the Load Average as 7.67 and the Metric Browser shows the Load as 767. To use one of the metrics in a health rule or custom dashboard, divide the metric by 100.

Stolen Times are Reported Differently

On Windows Machine Agents, if CPU %Stolen is not matching values reported by AppDynamics, it may be because Windows Performance Monitor's (Perfmon) counters operate at a granularity of 100ns for CPU metrics. For CPU %Stolen, the counters are provided by the Hypervisor, which operates on a granularity of 1ms. Windows Perfmon divides the CPU %Stolen counter (operating on 1ms) directly by time (in units of 100ns), which results in the CPU %Stolen values being reported at a very low percentage (~0.01%).

AppDynamics makes the correction between different units of time, which is why values reported by AppDynamics are greater than Perfmon's values by a factor of 10,000 (time in 1ms * 10,000 = time in 100ns). CPU %Stolen values reported by AppDynamics sometimes exceed 100% under high load. These CPU %Stolen values are a result of multiple cores being used by the guest machine, where %Stolen time is added across multiple cores.

To compute the %Stolen time:

On a PowerShell terminal in the monitored guest machine, run Get-WmiObject Win32_PerfRawData_vmGuestLib_VCPU.
Note the CpuStolenMs counter (in ms).
Note the Timestamp_PerfTime counter (in ms, take a look at Frequency_Perftime, this value should be 1000 (in hz)).
After a minute, run Get-WmiObject Win32_PerfRawData_vmGuestLib_VCPU again and take note of both the counters once more.
CPU %Stolen = 100% * (CpuStolenMS (at T2) - CpuStolenMs (at T1) / (Timestamp_PerfTime (T2) - Timestamp_PerfTime (T1)).

HardwareMonitor and JavaHardwareMonitor Calculate "Writes/Sec" Differently on AIX Machines

The Machine Agent calculates the Disk metric writes/sec on AIX machines differently, depending on whether the HardwareMonitor or the JavaHardwareMonitor extension is used. These extensions assume different block sizes when calculating these metrics. For HardwareMonitor, the block size is 4096 bytes. For JavaHardwareMonitor (based on SIGAR), the block size is 512 bytes. Because the number of writes/sec is calculated as <kb_written>/<block_size>, the HardwareMonitor results are lower than those calculated by JavaHardwareMonitor.