Overview

The client for "SPM for Node.js" is an open-source node.js monitoring agent that collects node.js processes' metrics and sends them to SPM. It is available as npm package that can be added to the JavaScript source code like any other node.js module (see Installation & Configuration section below)

The following metrics are collected and sent to SPM:

• Operating System

  • CPU usage 

  • Memory usage

• Process Memory Usage
• Number of Worker processes (when using "cluster" package for master/worker processes)
• Event Loop
  • Latencies (fastest, slowest, average)
• Garbage Collection (GC)
  • Counters for full GC
  • Counters for incremental GC
  • Time spend for GC
  • Difference in heap used after each GC cycle
• HTTP Server stats
  • Request count
  • Request rate
  • Content-Length
  • Error rates (total, 3xx, 4xx, 5xx)
• Custom Metrics
  • To track custom metrics like the number of concurrent users, the number of items placed in a shopping cart, or any other kind of business transaction or KPI 
    we provide a Custom Metrics API and a node.js client for it: spm-metrics-js 

Supported Platforms

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Installation and Configuration

1. Create an SPM App of type "Node.js" in SPM 
2. Click the "Install Monitor" button and follow the customized instructions for the created SPM App (basically how to install the NPM package, configure the SPM App Token, and add require statement to your source code to load 'spm-agent-nodejs')

Troubleshooting and "How To"

Generate diagnostics file for Sematext Support

If you are not seeing some or all node.js metrics, you can create a "diagnostics dump" and contact us via chat or email. To create the diagnostics dump just run the following in your application directory:

node ./node_modules/spm-agent-nodejs/bin/spm-client-diagnostics.js 

The output of this script points to the ZIP file and shows the Sematext Support email address to which the ZIP file should be sent. 

Using SPM for Node.js behind Firewalls / Proxy servers   

By default data is transmitted to SPM via HTTPS. If no direct connection is possible, a proxy server can be used by setting the environment variable HTTPS_PROXY=https://your-proxy.

Installation of native modules on Windows

The native modules are automatically compiled during "npm install" (using node-gyp). On Windows the required build tools like python or C++ compilers are typically not installed by default.
In this case please check https://github.com/TooTallNate/node-gyp for details about the required compiler and build tools.

Upgrading to a new node.js version

If you switch the node.js version (e.g. from 0.12 to 4.4), the spm-agent-nodejs package will need to be installed again (due to the fact that included native modules may change from version to version).   After the version change please run a fresh "npm install" if you added spm-agent-nodejs to the dependencies in your package.json - or at the very least run "npm install spm-agent-nodejs" 

Upgrading to the latest version of spm-agent-nodejs

To use the latest version of spm-agent-nodejs we recommend you install/upgrade using:

npm install spm-agent-nodejs@latest

To add the dependency to your package.json simply use:

npm install spm-agent-nodejs@latest --save

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