Designing a Monitoring Strategy

An effective monitoring and event management strategy is crucial to a successful deployment. Such a strategy defines which events should be monitored, which tools to use, and what action to take should an event occur. If you have a plan for commonplace events, possible outages and reduced levels of service can be prevented. This strategy improves the availability and quality of service of your directory.

To design a monitoring strategy, do the following:

• Select the appropriate monitoring tools. See Monitoring Tools Provided With Directory Server Enterprise Edition.

• Identify the key areas to be monitored in the directory architecture.

  These areas are frequently the same as the sizing and tuning attributes. See Identifying Monitoring Areas.

• Define what triggers an event or alarm condition when monitoring the key performance measure.

  This strategy implies defining an acceptable level of performance or operation for each performance measure.

• Determine what action should be taken when an alarm condition occurs.

Monitoring Tools Provided With Directory Server Enterprise Edition

This section provides a summary of the monitoring tools that are available in Directory Server Enterprise Edition as well as additional tools that can be used to monitor server activity.

The monitoring areas described in Identifying Monitoring Areas can be monitored using one or more of these tools.

• Command-line tools. Include operating system-specific tools to monitor performance such as disk usage, LDAP tools such as ldapsearch to collect server statistics stored in the directory, third-party tools, or custom shell or Perl scripts.

• Directory Server and Directory Proxy Server logs. Include the access, audit, and error logs. These logs can be monitored manually or parsed using custom scripts to extract monitoring information that is relevant to your deployment. The Directory Server Resource Kit provides a log analyzer tool, logconv, that enables you to analyze the access logs. The log analyzer tool extracts usage statistics and counts the occurrences of significant events. For more information about this tool, see logconv(1). For information about viewing and configuring log files, see Chapter 15, Directory Server Logging, in Sun Java System Directory Server Enterprise Edition 6.3 Administration Guide.

• Directory Service Control Center (DSCC). Is a graphical user interface that enables you to monitor directory operations in real time. DSCC provides general server information, including a resource summary, current resource usage, connection status, and global database cache information. It also provides general database information, such as the database type, status, and entry cache statistics. Cache information and information relative to each index file within the database is also provided. In addition, DSCC provides information relative to the connections and the operations performed on each chained suffix.

• Replication monitoring tools. Include the command-line tools, repldisc, insync and entrycmp.

  These tools enable you to do the following:

  • Monitor the state of synchronization between a master replica and one or more consumer replicas

  • Compare the same entry on two or more different replicas so that you can assess replication status

  • Depict your complete replication topology, which is particularly beneficial when dealing with complex directory deployments

  For more information, see repldisc(1), insync(1) and entrycmp(1).

  You can also monitor replication status by using the DCC. For more information about monitoring replication, see Getting Replication Status in Sun Java System Directory Server Enterprise Edition 6.3 Administration Guide.

• Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). Is the standard mechanism for global network control and monitoring, and enables network administrators to centralize network monitoring activity.

  For information about monitoring using an SNMP agent, see Chapter 16, Directory Server Monitoring, in Sun Java System Directory Server Enterprise Edition 6.3 Administration Guide.

• Java ES Monitoring Framework. Enables monitoring of performance and other statistics through JMX. For more information, see Directory Server and CMM/JMX in Sun Java System Directory Server Enterprise Edition 6.3 Reference.

Identifying Monitoring Areas

What you monitor, and to what extent, depends on your specific deployment. In general, however, include the following elements in your monitoring strategy:

• Server activity such as resource usage, server status, and connection information

• Database activity such as cache, transactions, locks, and log information

• Disk status including available disk space and threshold information

• Replication activity including status (whether or not replication is running), and the state of synchronization

• Indexing efficiency including unindexed searches, search filters, and frequently used indexes

• Security status including failed bind attempts, open connections, and effective rights