Rhino’s statistics subsystem collects three types of statistic:
-
counters — the number of occurrences of a particular event (unbounded and can only increase); for example, lock waits or rejected events
-
gauges — the amount of a particular object or item (can increase and decrease within some arbitrary bound, typically between 0 and some positive number); for example, free memory or active activities
-
samples — values every time a particular event or action occurs; for example, event-processing time or lock-manager wait time.
Rhino records and reports counter- and gauge-type statistics as absolute values. It tallies sample-type statistics, however, in a frequency distribution (which it reports to statistics clients such as rhino-stats).
Parameter sets
Rhino defines a set of related statistics as a parameter set. Many of the available parameter sets are organised hierarchically. Child parameter sets that represent related statistics from a particular source may contribute to parent parameter sets that summarise statistics from a group of sources.
For example, the Events parameter set summarises event statistics from all resource adaptor entities. Below this is a parameter set for each resource adaptor entity which summarises statistics for all the event types produced by that resource adaptor entity. Further below each of these is another parameter set for each event type fired by the resource adaptor entity. These last parameter sets record the raw statistics for each fired event type as summarised by the parent parameter sets. This means, when examining the performance of an application, you can drill down to analyse statistics on a per-event-type basis.
