Live User monitoring by jmeter

Question

I am looking to monitor live user responses through jmeter. Can the backend listener in jmeter used to record live users(end users)? I am not talking about virtual users that we set up in jmeter. But the real end users.How can this be achieved? Editing to add more details:

Our requirement is to monitor the real users, in 2-3 geographical locations, all through out the business hours..say from 8 to 5.

For this purpose, do you think, I need to have a dedicated machine with jmeter, grafana and influxdb for monitoring alone? I have other testing going on using jmeter and I don't want to use the same machine to do both monitoring and testing. DO you think this is achievable by jmeter? ANy suggestions?

Answer 1

We use to perform general production app (here- Scada-LTS) monitoring by javamelody. But this will give You general statistics. For per user monitoring it seems You should use log4j + ELK or other simpler syslog analyzing tool. Jmeter should be used rather for test environment for stress tests.

Answer 2

you can use the following tools in combination to achieve live monitoring:

1. JMeter backend Listener - to send results to influxDB
2. influxdb - store the results sent by backend listener
3. grafana - run continuous queries for metrics and plot graphs like average response times etc.

Follow the steps mentioned here:

1. http://jmeter.apache.org/usermanual/realtime-results.html - First Option
2. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/jmeter-live-performance-monitoring-dashboard-grafana-influxdb-sarker
3. http://www.testautomationguru.com/jmeter-real-time-results-influxdb-grafana/
4. http://techblogsearch.com/a/live-performance-result-monitoring-with-jmeter-grafana-influxdb.html