Monitoring

The Control Center actively monitors the state and health of devices in an I-Fabric. Monitoring provides visibility of an I-Fabric and supports failover and recovery or to restart failed processes.

The Control Center enables the following farm monitoring capabilities within an I-Fabric:

• Availability of resource pool devices (server farms) to enable automatic failover and availability of these devices for display in the Control Center monitoring screen.

• Basic performance monitors (disk, CPU, memory) for servers. You can display the monitoring information in the Control Center.

• Changes in farm or device status, state, and configuration that is recorded in event logs and optionally can be made available externally using Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) traps.

  • Events in monitoring farm state changes include activating, deactivating, and placing a farm in standby mode.

  • Events in farm configuration changes include adding, removing, and reconfiguring farm servers.

  • Events in device state changes and failures include server UP and server DOWN messages.

• Messages for events comprise three categories:

  • Informational messages, such as device availability or failure

  • Farm messages related to devices of a specific farm

  • Billing messages

Monitoring messages are forwarded to the service processor. The service processor then sends the messages to a central message repository in the CPDB. You can view monitoring data using the Control Center monitoring screen. You can also configure monitoring events for farm server utilization, such as disk and CPU, by using the Control Center monitoring screen.

Optionally, you can configure the CPDB to forward messages to an external network management system (NMS). An SNMP connection and a management information base (MIB) extension are required for forwarding messages to an external NMS.

Additional tools for monitoring system health include operating system and Control Center commands. For details regarding system health monitoring, see Chapter 4, Monitoring and Messaging in N1 Provisioning Server 3.1, Blades Edition, System Administration Guide.