1. Global Data Services Concepts and Administration
  2. Global Service Manager

Global Service Manager

Learn what a global service manager is, how it functions in Global Data Services, and why it is essential for service management.

A global service manager (GSM) is the central software component of Global Data Services (GDS). The GSM provides service-level load balancing, failover, and centralized management of services within a GDS configuration. Global Data Services clients use a GSM to perform all GDS configuration operations.

A GSM is similar to the remote listener in an Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) database, but it serves multiple databases instead of one. The GSM is associated with one and only one GDS configuration. Each region in the GDS configuration must have at least one GSM. Configure multiple GSMs in each region to improve availability and performance. Every GSM in a GDS configuration manages all global services supported by the configuration.

A global service manager performs the following functions:

  • Acts as a regional listener that clients use to connect to global services.
  • Provides connect-time load balancing for clients.
  • Manages global services across the regions of a GDS configuration.
  • Collects performance metrics from databases in the GDS configuration and measures network latency between configuration regions.
  • Creates a run-time load balancing advisory and publishes it to client connection pools.
  • Monitors availability of database instances and global services, and notifies clients if they fail.

Note:

A master GSM makes metadata changes in the catalog database, for instance when adding a new global data service or adding a new shard. If the master GSM goes down, then another GSM will become the new master. Any other GSMs associated to a region is a region GSM.

Parent topic: Global Data Services Components