In this chapter, we walked through how JMeter can help with monitoring server resources. To do that, we set up an Apache Tomcat server. Once done, we examined the built-in capabilities of JMeter with regards to monitoring. We further examined how we could get more granular monitoring metrics by extending JMeter with custom-developed plugins. This allowed us to monitor server resources such as CPU, disk I/O, memory, and network I/O, among other things. Through the plugin, we also got additional samplers, timers, processors, and listeners that allowed us to monitor transactions per second and response time versus thread metrics. Though not an extensive monitoring tool, JMeter proved itself a capable tool to do basic monitoring of server resources.
In the next chapter, we will go into depth on distributed testing and see how to leverage the capabilities of JMeter to accomplish this.