Server tiles

The IntelliSurvey platform is designed to provide optimal performance for survey takers and administrative users. Designed-in efficiency notwithstanding, there are circumstances which can adversely affect IntelliSurvey's performance, as with any web-based application. To minimize the impact of such circumstances, it is prudent to monitor system speed and resources. To facilitate this, IntelliSurvey provides real-time metrics on system performance to administrative users. These metrics can be found on the Server Status tile. This tile appears by default on the home dashboard and can be re-added if removed by clicking the ‘server’ button next to the text ‘add tile’ on the menu underneath the ribbon.

Explanation of metrics

There are four tabs at the top of the Server Status tile: RPM, CPU, MEMORY, and APPS. Each provides a different vantage point into system behavior, and may provide clues that can help to explain any period of sub-optimal performance. Additionally, each tab provides a graph which allows you to view the given metric over the past hour, day, week or month, to get a sense of how present activity measures against past data.

RPM

The RPM tab graph displays RPM, an acronym for Responses per Minute. This is a measure of survey page submissions: how many survey pages (responses) are submitted to the server per minute.  RPM is an indicator of how hot a whole server is running. The acceptable range of RPM is governed by the hardware configuration on which IntelliSurvey is installed. Check with your administrator to find out the normal operating RPM of your IntelliSurvey system.

CPU

CPU is a measure of how much work that the system running IntelliSurvey is performing. This is a standard computing metric of system administration where 0 represents no work and 1 represents a full computing load for a single CPU core. This information is presented for three time periods: the load of the last hour, the last day, last week, and the last month. In today’s multi-core multi-processor servers, the actual upper limit and range of acceptable workloads can be far greater than 1. Check with your system administrator to find out the acceptable range of computing loads on your IntelliSurvey server.

MEMORY

MEMORY shows system memory activity. This information is intended to be useful for system administrators to monitor the amount of free memory available on the system.  The numbers here are another way of looking at resource utilization and are calculated as a percentage based on total system memory.  

APPS

APPS displays a list of all the surveys running on the server to which the user has access, and is useful for hunting down where most of the respondent activity is. In addition to RPM, it is also possible to view and sort by ART. ART is Average Response Time. This measures the time it takes our service to process each response.  This isn’t quite the time between when a respondent clicks ‘Next >>’ and when the next page displays; our processing time is just one part of that whole round-trip.  But since we do know exactly how long we take, we can use that as an approximate measure of how fast a survey feels to respondents:  are survey pages coming back quickly, in 0.10 seconds or less? Or are they taking 2 or 3 or more seconds per response, forever in internet time? As a general rule, an ART of around .15 seconds can be considered normal.

If the ART for a particular survey is much higher than the rest, it is a good indication that part of its programming is suspect.

Defaulting sorting is descending value of RPM.

Balancing system resources

Each piece of the server—administration, reporting and the surveys—has to share the server with the other pieces.  As the volume of respondents increases, the server shifts more of its resources to the survey piece.  In extreme cases, the server will have to pull almost all resources away from the admin and reports to handle the surveys.  In this scenario, surveys will still function normally for respondents, and data will be collected reliably, but admin and reports can feel slow. This is normal: as administrative users continue to use the reports and administrative tools the server will notice, give them more resources, and the reports and admin tools will speed back up.