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Which are the most important processes?

Within the Processes section of the Host page, you'll see the most important processes running on this host, categorized into process groups. In the image below, you can see various process group instances categorized based on technology type. Notice, for example, the two process group instances at the bottom of the page, nodejsWeather and nodejsWeatherImages, which are based on Node.js technology.

You can click the All processes button (see image above) to view the list of selected processes that meet at least one of the following criteria:

  • Processes that are well known applications:

    • Java application servers (Tomcat, WebSphere, Weblogic, Glassfish, JBoss)
    • All other Java applications
    • All .NET applications
    • Databases: MS SQL, Oracle, MySQL, Cassandra, SQL server, CouchDB, MongoDB, PostgresSQL
    • Additional technologies: Node.js, PHP
    • Web servers: NGINX, Apache HTTP, IIS
    • Processes that use the OneAgent SDK for C/C++

  • Processes that have an open TCP listening port

  • Processes for which one of the following conditions is met for at least 3 of the last 5 one-minute intervals:

    • Avg(CPU) > 5%
    • Max(Memory) > 5%
    • Network Traffic > 5%.

  • Processes that have been defined by a user as being important. For example, by enabling Log Monitoring for a process.

Note: DESK provides also the option of monitoring specific processes that fall into neither of these categories.

Process group details

The process list provides basic information about system and network resources that are consumed by the process, such as the following.

CPU
CPU percentage consumed by the process.

Memory
System memory percentage consumed by the process.

Traffic
Network traffic to and from the process.

Retransmissions
Retransmitted (either direction)

Connectivity
Connectivity is a percentage of successfully established TCP sessions minus the sum of TCP connection refused (as percentage) and TCP connection timeouts (as percentage).

Why does DESK not show worker processes?

If you run Apache HTTP Server, for example, you may be accustomed to seeing long lists of worker processes (see example below). Here you see numerous Apache HTTP Server processes listed on a Linux terminal. For the sake of clarity and manageability however, DESK consolidates such lists into process group instances. We do this across hosts but also on individual hosts.