Performance monitoring. What to look for?

[magnust]

I've searched a bit for pointers on what to monitor and look for to ensure that the hardware isn't too stressed, possibly resulting in performance degradation for the users surfing our webserver behind our brand new shiny OPNsense box.


If I start with the Dashboard:

I can see the cpu usage varying quite a bit with short peaks up at 80 - 90% but mostly staying around 10 - 20%. What the cpu peaks really mean for actual performance, possible degradation in bandwidth and latency, I have no clue. The orange bars all have good low numbers, the highest being memory at 18%, looking very good.


On to the Reporting page:

Again it's the cpu load I'm wondering about. I've tried to find info on what ranges of the processor values that could be considered no-problem, bordeline-problem and really-bad.
Processes are at a steady 140, user varies between 4 and 10 with peaks up to 20 with resolution at standard but up to 40 with high resolution (at 20 hours zoom). System peaks at 5 in standard resolution and 15 in high resolution in the 20 hours zoom setting.

(the difference in peak values between standard and high resolution of course being due to the short short peaks being averaged out in the whole time slot measured)



Anyone have tips on any good web page with info or some rule of thumbs?