varnish Monitoring Varnish Cache performance

Example

Perhaps the most important performance metric is the hitrate.

Varnish routes it's incoming requests like this:

• Hash, a cacheable request. This might be either hit or miss depending on the state of the cache.
• Hitpass, a not cacheable request.

A hash with a miss and a hitpass will be fetched from the server backend and delivered. A hash with a hit will be delivered directly from the cache.

Metrics to monitor:

• cache_hit - Number of hashes with a hit in the cache.
• cache_miss - Number of hashes with a miss in the cache.
• cache_hitpass - Number of hitpasses as above.

varnishstat -1 | grep "cache_hit \|cache_miss \|cache_hitpass"
MAIN.cache_hit              99032838         5.36 Cache hits
MAIN.cache_hitpass                 0         0.00 Cache hits for pass
MAIN.cache_miss             42484195         2.30 Cache misses

Calculate the actual hitrate like this:

cache_hit / (cache_hit + cache_miss)

In this example the hitrate is 0.7 or 70%. You want to keep this as high as possible. 70% is a decent number. You can improve hitrate by increasing memory and customizing your vcl. Also monitor big changes in your hitrate.