Endeca Analytics Test

Endeca Server is a hybrid search-analytical engine that organizes complex and varied data from disparate sources and unifies search, navigation, and analytics to deliver fast answers on structured and unstructured data. The effectiveness of the server is typically measured by its speed - i.e., how quickly it executes the search queries from users and returns the output. Frequent slowdowns experienced by users can seriously impact the user experience and significantly delay even routine business transactions, thus causing users to lose faith in the capability of the target server and compelling them to use it less and less. Therefore, it is imperative that administrators should continuously monitor capability of the target Endeca server in processing search queries to prevent performance lag, if any and ensure better user experience. The Endeca Analytics Test helps administrators in this regard.

This test continuously monitors the target Endeca server, reports the time taken for processing user's search queries and promptly alerts administrators to performance lag in terms of latencies, if any. In addition, this test also reports the time taken for parsing, type checking and evaluating the queries. These metrics help administrators to identify where exactly the query processing is delayed and troubleshoot the bottleneck condition at the earliest.

Target of the test : An Endeca Search Application

Agent deploying the test : An internal agent

Outputs of the test : One set of results the Endeca search application being monitored.

Configurable parameters for the test

Parameter	Description
Test period	How often should the test be executed
Host	The IP address of the host for which this test is to be configured.
Port	The port at which the specified host listens to. The default port is 15000.
PerfStatURL	Specify the URL to access the page from which this test will be collecting the required statistics. The default URL will be in the format: http://{Endeca_Server_IP}:8000/admin?op=stats

Measurements made by the test

Measurement	Description	Measurement Unit	Interpretation
Total processing time	Indicates the time taken by the Endeca to process the search queries.	Seconds	Ideally, the value of this measure should be low. A high value indicates that the engine is taking longer time to process the search queries. Further investigation is required to isolate the root-cause of the processing bottleneck.
Query parsing time	Indicates the time taken for parsing the search queries.	Seconds	Ideally, the value of this measure should be low. A high value indicates that the engine is taking longer time to parse the search queries, thus increasing the query processing time.
Type checking time	Indicates the time taken for type checking of the search queries.	Seconds	The value of this measure should be low.
Evaluation time	Indicates the time taken for evaluating the search queries.	Seconds	A high value for this measure indicates that the target server is taking more time to evaluate the search queries.