1. Administrator's Guide
  2. Monitor
  3. Monitoring the Store
  4. Software Monitoring

Software Monitoring

Being a distributed system, the Oracle NoSQL Database is composed of several software components and each expose unique metrics that can be monitored, interpreted, and utilized to understand the general health, performance, and operational capability of the Oracle NoSQL Database cluster.

This section focuses on best practices for monitoring the Oracle NoSQL software components. While there are several software dependencies for the Oracle NoSQL Database itself (for example, Java virtual machine, operating system, NTP), this section focuses solely on the NoSQL components.

There are four basic mechanisms for monitoring the health of the Oracle NoSQL Database:

  • System Log File Monitoring – Oracle NoSQL Database uses the java.util.logging package to write all trace, information, and error messages to the log files for each component of the store. These files can be parsed using the typical log file probing mechanism supported by the leading system management solutions.

  • Application Monitoring – A good proxy for the “health” of the Oracle NoSQL Database rests with application level metrics. Metrics like average and 90th percentile response times, average and 90th percentile throughput, as well average number of timeout exceptions encountered from NoSQL API calls are all potential indicators that something may be wrong with a component in the NoSQL cluster. In fact, sampling these metrics and looking for deviations from mean values can be the best way to know that something may be wrong with your environment.

  • Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) – The integration of Oracle NoSQL Database with OEM primarily takes the form of an EM plug-in. The plug-in allows monitoring store components, their availability, performance metrics, and operational parameters through Enterprise Manager. For more information on OEM, see About IntelliJ Plugin.

The following sections discuss details of each of these monitoring techniques (except OEM) and illustrate how each of them can be utilized to detect failures in Oracle NoSQL Database components.