Introduction to Monitoring

Monitoring in the Sun N1 System Manager software enables you to track changes to specific attributes in specific managed objects. Managed objects include server hardware elements, operating systems, file systems, and networks. Attributes are the monitored elements, about which data is obtained and delivered by the N1 System Manager software. Examples of attributes are the average number of queued processes and the percentage of used memory. A list of attributes is provided in Hardware Sensor Attributes and in Table 5–2.

Attributes are associated with three main areas:

• Hardware health attributes. For information about hardware health monitoring, see Hardware Health Monitoring.

• OS resource attributes. For information about OS health monitoring, see OS Health Monitoring.

• Network connectivity, or reachability. For information about network reachability monitoring, see Network Reachability Monitoring.

For a server or a group of servers, hardware health and operating system health and network connectivity are all monitored by the management server. All comparisons and verifications for monitoring are performed by the N1 System Manager. Provisionable servers are used only to access data about their health or network reachability.

Monitoring is connected with the broadcasting of the events for each monitored server or group of servers. Events are generated when certain conditions related to attributes occur. For information about events and when they occur, see Managing Event Log Entries. Monitoring data is stored as events in the N1 System Manager database instead of log files.

If monitoring is enabled for a server, each event causes a notification to be emitted from the N1 System Manager for that event. If monitoring is disabled for a server, monitoring events are not generated for that server. Lifecycle events continue to be generated, even with monitoring disabled. Lifecycle events include server discovery, server change or deletion, or server group creation. If you have requested notification of this type of event, you can still receive notifications for that event, even with monitoring disabled.

An SNMP agent that is used for data retrieval is provided in the N1 System Manager software. If the management server is running the N1 System Manager on the Solaris OS, this agent is based on the Sun Management Center 3.5 software SNMP agent. If the management server is running the N1 System Manager on Linux, this agent is based on the Sun Management Center 3.6 Linux SNMP agent. The agent is deployed when operating systems are deployed on servers that are managed by the N1 System Manager software. The N1 System Manager passively listens for the traps generated by the SNMP agent whenever there is a threshold breach. In case the traps generated by the SNMP agent are lost, the N1 System Manager also performs to types of polling-based monitoring as a backup: accessibility monitoring and status monitoring. Accessibility monitoring makes sure that the N1 System Manager can access the OS agent. Status monitoring periodically retrieves the current status from the SNMP agent and reports if the status is not OK.

The default SNMP port for the agent for the monitoring feature is port 161. Changing the port number from the default is not supported in this release.