The importance of monitoring GeoServer

As with all business systems, it is important to monitor the health and performance of GeoServer. There are many reasons why we should do this, but for the key ones, we need to:

• Understand the amount of sustained load our server can handle

• Benchmark performance to monitor our server

• Understand what factors cause our server(s) to crash

• Know when our server is in danger of being overloaded

• Know when our server has been overloaded

There are numerous tools available that allow us to examine various web logfiles and gather statistics on how our server performs generally, but in a spatial context, we also need to gain some understanding of how well our server delivers map data. There are a number of online services that we can register our GeoServer with to perform this kind of monitoring. Services such as MapMeter from Boundless (http://boundlessgeo.com/solutions/mapmeter/http://boundlessgeo.com/solutions/mapmeter/) provide commercial monitoring solutions.

However...