Monitoring the agent

Accessing the Deployment page

To monitor the agent, navigate to the Deployment page:

1. Log in to the Fastly control panel.
2. Go to Security > Next-Gen WAF > Deployment.
3. From the workspaces bar, click the menu to the right of the workspace name and select a workspace.

About the Deployment page for Edge WAF deployments

For workspaces with an Edge WAF deployment, the Deployment page states that your workspace's Edge WAF deployment is a managed deployment. This means that Fastly manages your deployment.

About the Deployment page for On-Prem WAF deployments

For workspaces with an On-Prem WAF deployment, the Deployment page surfaces relevant information and data about your Next-Gen WAF agents via two tabs:

• Overview: a tab featuring agent information (e.g., status and version).
• Metrics: a tab highlighting key agent stats (e.g., memory consumed and latency times).

From the Deployment page, you can:

• click View agent keys to view and copy the Agent Access key and Agent Secret key for the workspace. You need these keys to start and update agents.
• use a single set of filters to narrow the list of agents on both the Overview and Metrics tabs.
• use the search bar on the Overview or Metrics tab to narrow the list of agents on the active tab.
• click the document icon next to an agent to go to the Agent details page, which contains more information about the agent.

About the Agent details page

The Agent details page displays information about an agent's status and performance across two tabs. The Status tab lists deployment and runtime metrics for the agent. The Charts tab contains the following graphs:

• Total requests (req/sec): the number of requests per second received for your workspace (site).
• Decision time (ms): the amount of time it took for the agent to process requests. When the 99th percentile line is at 10 ms, the agent took between 0–10 ms to process 99% of requests and more than 10 ms to process the remaining 1% of requests.
• CPU percentage: the percentage of CPU power used by the host and by the agent.

Accessing the Agents page

To monitor the agent, navigate to the Agents page:

1. Log in to the Next-Gen WAF control panel.
2. From the Sites menu, select a site if you have more than one site.
3. Click Agents in the navigation bar near the top of the screen.

The Agents page surfaces relevant information and data about your agents via two tabs:

• Overview: a tab featuring agent information (e.g., status, version, module, operating system, and server).
• Metrics: a tab highlighting key agent stats (e.g., current requests, connections total, connections open, and connections dropped).

From the Agents page, you can:

• click Manage alerts to set up and manage agent alerts. Agent alerts use configured integrations to inform you when thresholds for agents are reached.
• click View agent keys to access the agent keys window. From the agent keys window, you can copy the Agent Access key and Agent Secret key for the site. You need these keys to start and update agents.
• click the name of an agent to view agent details.

Viewing agent details

Clicking the name of an agent from the Agents page opens the agent details. The agent details contains the following tabs that provide information about the agent:

• Status: lists various agent, runtime, module, and host metrics related to the agent.
• Requests: lists request the agent handled.
• Logs: an event log for agent activity.
• Charts: a dashboard containing graphs of metrics to help you understand the performance impact on your infrastructure.

About the Charts tab

The Next-Gen WAF provides a number of metrics to understand the performance impact on your infrastructure. You can verify the performance impact on your infrastructure directly in the control panel via the Charts tab.

The Charts tab contains graphs detailing the requests the agent has processed, any errors observed, memory usage, CPU percentage, decision times, and more. Many of these graphs report percentiles. For example, the Decision time (ms) graph uses percentiles to show the amount of time it takes the agent to process requests. When the 99th percentile line is at 10 ms, the agent took between 0-10 ms to process 99% of requests and more than 10 ms to process the remaining 1% of requests.

You can use the time selector in the top left to change the time range being reported on all of the charts.

The following graphs appear on the Charts tab:

• Total requests (req/sec): the number of requests per second received for your workspace (site).
• Connections (req/sec): the total number of connections and the total number of dropped connections per second.
• Connections open: the total number of open connections handled by the agent.
• CPU percentage: the percentage of CPU power used by the host and by the agent.
• Runtime memory total, heap and stack (bytes): the total memory being used by the agent.
• Uptime (seconds): the agent uptime, in seconds.
• Decision time (ms): the amount of time it took for the agent to process requests.
• Agent queue time (ms): the amount of time it took for the agent to begin processing requests where there is a backlog of requests.
• Agent clock skew (seconds): the difference in time between the agent's clock and the platform's clock.

To view advanced charts, click Show advanced charts. The following graphs appear.

• Requests uploaded (req/sec): the number of requests per second uploaded by the agent to the platform.
• Requests after sampling (req/sec): the number of incoming requests per second handed to the agent.
• Request size, avg. (bytes): the average size of web request in bytes. This is calculated by dividing the sum of read and written bytes by the number of requests.
• RPC PreRequest (req/sec): the number of incoming requests handed to the agent.
• RPC UpdateRequest (req/sec): the number of remote calls to agent to update details of request, post execution. Reported in requests per second.
• RPC PostRequest (req/sec): the number of remote calls to the agent to note requests that met one of the following conditions: the server returned an HTTP status of 400 or above, the size of the request was abnormally large, or the request took an abnormal amount of time to process.
• Goroutines: the number of goroutines running simultaneously on the agent
• Garbage collections: the number of time the garbage collector ran.
• GC pause time (ms/sec): the garbage collector pause time in milliseconds.
• Host memory available (bytes): the amount of memory available on the host machine in bytes.
• Rule updates: the number of times the agent updated its rules.
• Communication failures: the number of failed uploads and downloads per agent.
• Agent latency time (ms): the total amount of time that requests are in the queue and processed by the agent.
• Agent post time (ms): the amount of time since the agent's last data sync with the cloud engine.
• RPC MissedUpdateRequest (req/sec): the number of missed remote calls to the agent to update details of the request, post execution. Reported in requests per second.
• Agent missed update time (ms): the amount of time that has passed since the agent update timed out.