Panorama CPU Test

This test continuously monitors the CPU utilization of the target Palo Alto Panorama and promptly identifies CPU bottleneck conditions, if any. This test tracks the percentage of CPU time spent on system CPU, user CPU, and nice processes. This way, administrators can easily identify where and why the panorama experiences CPU contention, is it because a high CPU is used by the system, users, or nice processes? or is the CPU idle for a long time? This in turn helps administrators proactively detect and resolve any bottleneck conditions before they affect the panorama's performance.

Target of the test: Palo Alto Panorama

Agent deploying the test: A Remote Agent

Outputs of the test: One set of results for Palo Alto Panorama that is being monitored.

Configurable parameters for the test

Parameter	Description
Test period	How often should the test be executed.
Host	The IP address of the target host to be monitored.
Port	Specify the port at which the specified host listens to.
API Key	The eG agent collects the required metrics from the target Palo Alto Panorama by executing API commands using XML API and pulls out critical metrics. In order to collect metrics, the eG agent should be provided with a valid API key.
SSL	By default, this flag is set to Yes indicating that the SSL (Secured Socket Layer) is used to connect to the target Palo Alto Panorama. If not so, set the SSL flag to No .

Measurements made by the test

Measurement	Description	Measurement Unit	Interpretation
User process	Indicates the percentage of CPU time spent on user processes.	Percent	An unusually high value indicates a problem and may be due to too many user/system processes executing simultaneously. In that case, you may want to compare the value of these measures to know which process is hogging the CPU and while doing what - when processing system operations? or user operations?
System process	Indicates the percentage of CPU time spent on system processes.	Percent
Nice process	Indicates the percentage of CPU time that the instance spent in running nice processes.	Percent	Nice is program that is used to invoke a utility or shell script with a particular priority, thus giving the process more or less CPU time than other processes. Compare the value of this measure with that of the User Process and System Process measures to know where CPU time has been spent the maximum - in running user processes? system processes? being idle? or running nice processes?
Idle cpu	Indicates the percentage of CPU time that the instance spent without processing any requests - i.e., just being idle.	Percent	Ideally, a low value is desired.