Web Gateway 7.1.5 Product Guide - McAfee

Performance measurement
Monitoring
Performance measurement 8
Processing time consumed for particular activities is measured on the appliance and displayed on the
user interface. This section tells you where it is displayed and how you can set up rules for logging
processing time and for measuring it on your own.
View performance information
How the appliance performs is measured by recording average processing times for several activities
such as performing DNS lookups or processing client requests. This information is displayed on the
dashboard of the user interface.
To view this information:
1 Go to Dashboard | Charts and Tables.
2 Select Performance Information.
For details about the information displayed here, see Overview of charts and tables information.
Properties for logging performance information
You can log performance information using logging rules with appropriate properties. For each type of
performance information, a corresponding property is available.
For example, the dashboard displays information on the average time it takes to resolve host names by
looking up names on a DNS server. The property Timer.ResolveHostNameViaDNS corresponds to this
information. The value of this property is the time that was consumed for looking up a host name
appearing in a request that was processed on the appliance. The time is measured in milliseconds.
You can use this property to create an element in a log line. When this line is written to a log file by a
logging rule, the time for looking up host names is recorded together with other information covered by
the log line.
Other properties that make performance information available for logging include Timer.HandleConnect
ToServer for measuring the time needed to connect to external servers or Timer.TimeConsumedByRule
Engine for the time the rule engine needs to do its job when a request is received on the appliance.
The time that is measured and made available by a property includes the time needed for the relevant
activity, for example, connecting to external servers while a particular request was processed on the
appliance throughout all relevant processing cycles (request, response, and embedded object cycles).
Processing one individual request on the appliance is considered to be one transaction.
A transaction need not go through all cycles for a given request. For example, if a user sends a request
to access a web page falling into a category that is blocked under a particular web security policy, a
block message is returned to this user, the request is not forwarded to a web server, and processing
does not enter the response cycle.
All properties that make performance information available for logging have the element Timer at the
beginning of their names. For more information on these properties, see the List of properties.
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