So far we have examined how we can use the inbuilt server monitoring capabilities of JMeter to monitor server health. While this might be OK for basic needs, it falls short for advanced needs. For instance, the graphs generated don't provide CPU and disk I/O metrics that could be deemed critical for your analysis. To get such metrics, you could extend JMeter with a suite of plugins that give better results. JMeter plugins, hosted on Google code at https://code.google.com/p/jmeter-plugins/, is a neat project that aims to extend JMeter with some much-needed features that are lacking out of the box. The project provides additional samplers, graphs, listeners, and so on, all of which make it easier to work with JMeter. In this section, we will install this suite of plugins and use the monitoring capability it provides to get better metrics.
The only prerequisite for installing it is that you are running JMeter 2.8 or later with JRE (the Java Runtime...