Among the main features that can make your web service a successful one, there is reliability and speed. Almost every user hates slow applications and broken sessions. One of the most frustrating experiences is to stare at your browser waiting for the page to load completely, and unless you are a network engineer, checking whether the services are broken is not all that fun.

So, monitoring your services is a crucial point to assure your users that they will have a fast and reliable response. There are many specialized tools to monitor a task; as an example, a general purpose tool such as Nagios (http://www.nagios.org/) is a valid open source option.

GeoServer offers a specialized extension to collect data about incoming requests. This data can quickly be visualized in a few ready-to-use reports. We'll also explore how to use them for service analysis to create custom reports. Also, to avoid your instance from collapsing under too much load, the control flow module extension is a very nice option. It allows you to properly limit the requests' flow, creating a queue when in peak time.