Find out what's going on with NPM when accessing through the webserver

Question

Some of you probably already know about this but I found an extension for firefox that gives a lot of information about what's going on in the background when accessing a webpage.  It's called FireBug... homepage is:

http://getfirebug.com/

When you turn the console on under network tab you can see which part of your Orion pages take X amount of time... helps to see what's holding things up if you have a lot of devices or lots of resources on your pages.  I've just started playing around with this extension but so far I'm finding out things about how Orion functions I could only guess about before.

ecklerwr1 · Answer

You're so right Casey.  The graphical Net Timeline is super cool... and you are also right about the error messages.  Made me think about LaPoint's new poll on whether or not we are using IE6... I know when you try to get product to work with every version of IE and conform to everyone elses (FF, Opera, Chrome, etc.) normal standard based browswers... it can get kinda hairy to say the least.  As long as the web interface to the application functions as it should... some of things going on behind the scenes just have to be.  Another cool not exactly develop extension I've been using is FastestFox.  The endless pages is really cool... even works with thwack... choose a topic then just scroll wheel all the way down through as many pages as you want :}

Thanks for all your help and participation on here... you and the rest of the SolarWinds team really make using your products better by actively working with us to resolve problems and to improve the product for everyone's benefit.

FormerMember · Answer

FireBug is a great tool.  We use it pretty extensively around here while doing development.  One of the more useful things I've used it for is looking at web performance.  It gives a really good breakdown of where time is being spent when loading a web page.

For example, using it(and it looks like the latest version has made some improvements on this) you can see how much time the web browser is waiting for a page request to be handled by the server, how long it takes to pull the page from the server, as well as how long the page takes to render in the browser.  This maps pretty well to time spent with Orion code(DB calls, page generation), network performance between Orion and the machine you're browsing from, and the speed of the browser.

One other thing to keep in mind...  Just because you may see something that FireBug is reporting as an error, doesn't really mean it's an error.  Some of what looks like an error may be necessary to properly support an older version, or provide backwards compatibility for other resources that users have added in the past.  We strive really hard to minimize these kinds of things, but sometimes we have to do it.  You may also see some things that raise an error in FireBug, that have no impact on end user functionality.  We try and keep these to a minimum as well, but they make it through.

If you stumble across any interesting plug-ins, let me know.  We're always looking for dev tools to help make our lives easier. :)

ecklerwr1 · Answer

I'm still digging into the capabilities of this extension... there's even extensions built for the extension :}

I'm even finding bugs in some of the NPM already :P