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Setting up Monitoring, Alerts, and Operations

JBoss Operations Network 3.0.1

for monitoring resources and responding to incidents

December 7, 2011, updated March 18, 2012

Abstract

The primary function of JBoss Operations Network is monitoring the status of your resources. The core of monitoring includes critical availability monitoring, collecting metrics on platform and server performance, and tracking events. JBoss ON also provides a way to define alerts and then notify administrators whenever a resource is performing poorly.
This guide provides GUI-based procedures to view monitoring information, to track events, to define alerts and notifications, and to initiate operations.

1. Summary: Monitoring and Responding to Resource Activity

One of the core functions of JBoss Operations Network is that it lets administrators stay aware of the state of their JBoss servers, platforms, and overall IT environment.
The current state of individual servers and applications provides critical information to IT staff about traffic and usage, equipment failures, and server performance. JBoss Operations Network can supply a clearer picture of these critical data by automatically monitoring resources in its inventory.
JBoss ON builds on historical monitoring data by establishing trends, baselines, and maximum and minimum boundaries for each individual resource. JBoss ON handles two different types of monitoring data:
  • Metrics, which are regularly-scheduled polls of the current values of different logging or performance areas.
  • Events, which are actions or situations on a resource which happen randomly (such as shutting down) and are reported immediately when they occur.
Once there is a clear and running method to identify the current state of the infrastructure, then it is possible to react to changing states. JBoss ON has an alert framework which can take two actions based on monitoring and event data:
  • Notifications which warn and inform administrators of unexpected or undesirable changes in the IT environment.
  • Resource actions which take automatic, specific action. This can be launching a JBoss ON CLI script to deploy an application bundle or new configuration, a resource script to act on the local system, a resource operation, or other action.
The most powerful aspect of management is the ability to know, accurately, where your resources are and to respond to that ever-changing situation reliably.