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. 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 managed server or server group, 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. Managed nodes are used only to access data about their health or network reachability.

Introduction to Events and Notifications

Monitoring is connected with the broadcasting of the events for each managed server or server group. 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 managed servers, each event causes a notification to be emitted from the N1 System Manager for that event. Notification rules can be created to notify staff about events that happen with managed servers. See Setting Up Event Notifications for details.

Monitoring Using SNMP

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, the SNMP agent that is used for data retrieval is based on the Sun Management Center 3.5 software SNMP agent.

• If the management server is running the N1 System Manager on Linux, the SNMP agent that is used for data retrieval is based on the Sun Management Center 3.6 Linux SNMP agent.

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.

The SNMP agent is deployed when operating systems are provisioned on to servers that are managed by the N1 System Manager. 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 two types of polling-based monitoring as a backup:

• 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.