Application Monitoring

Cluster Server Monitoring

Ensuring High Availability Application Management on Microsoft and Veritas Cluster Servers

Introduction

For many organizations, application downtime is simply not an option. That’s why the adoption of Microsoft and Veritas high availability (HA) clustering solutions has become increasingly widespread. With these solutions in place, organizations are able to leverage sophisticated system redundancy to improve uptime for their critical applications.

Yet with these failover solutions deployed, controlling service delivery, both from an operational and application perspective, becomes exceedingly complex. To be effective, administrators need a cohesive view of this intricate system and all its associated components—but traditional systems management solutions only provide isolated, component-centric views. Consequently, administrators often fail to get continuous monitoring visibility during failover situations, receive duplicate alarms, and get false status information.

The Solution

With the NimBUS for Cluster Server Monitoring Probe, administrators can manage all HA components from a single, intuitive interface. Nimsoft comprehensively monitors applications in clustered environments—regardless of which active node they are running on. During HA failover conditions, the NimBUS cluster probe maintains consistent, uninterrupted alarm generation and quality-of-service data, so administrators can immediately receive appropriate notification. As a result, administrators can significantly reduce the time spent monitoring, while gaining the timely, accurate insights they need to spot, and address, potential issues before they have an impact on service delivery.

Monitors

• Clusters
• Cluster nodes
• Resources
• Failover service groups

Features

• Single view into the entire clustered infrastructure—including clusters, service groups, and resources as well as associated operating systems and applications
• Robust, intuitive management interface makes all administrative tasks fast and easy
• Extensive quality-of-service metrics can be tracked, and automated alerts generated if any elements exceed performance or availability thresholds

Benefits

• Enjoy cost and time savings through streamlined administration of complex clustered networks
• Improve system performance and availability through improved infrastructure visibility
• Ensure SLA compliance of business-critical HA services

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Cluster Awareness Yields Accuracy and Efficiency

The NimBUS Cluster Probe offers cluster awareness that simplifies and takes the guess work out of monitoring Microsoft and Veritas cluster environments. When deployed, the NimBUS cluster probe is installed on each node in the cluster. Each probe maintains continuous communication with the Microsoft and Veritas cluster service to identify changing cluster configurations and automatically migrate monitoring across cluster nodes whenever needed. 

This automatic movement of NimBUS monitoring ensures that all applications within a cluster will always be monitored for high availability and performance—regardless of where a process, service, application, or application subsystem moves within a cluster. With the NimBUS cluster probe, no manual activation, reconfiguration, or duplication of monitoring is required.

NimBUS equips administrators with fast, intuitive insights, providing notification of state changes through real-time alarms in dashboards and color-coded text alarm views. NimBUS can identify these cluster state changes:

Cluster node
- Up/down

Cluster resource group
- Pending offline/online
- Online/offline
- Moved
- Stopped

The NimBUS Cluster probe supports Microsoft cluster servers on Windows and Veritas cluster servers on Windows, Linux, and Solaris. NimBUS supports the following cluster configurations:

• Active/Active
• Active/Passive
• N+1 (Microsoft Exchange clusters)

Insights for Proactive Management

The NimBUS cluster probe offers a range of features that enable customers to proactively manage multi-node cluster environments:

• Complete HA visibility. The NimBUS cluster probe can be used to monitor and report on the availability and performance of the entire HA system, from cluster servers, nodes, service groups, and resources through to the operating system and hosted application.
• Continuous monitoring coverage. The NimBUS cluster probe monitors the status of essential cluster processes and resources, ensuring core components are available at all times.
• Automated alerts. Warnings and or alarms are generated based on user-defined thresholds for operational and failover conditions.

Cohesive Views of the Entire Infrastructure

The NimBUS cluster probe is complemented by over 100 NimBUS network, server, database, and application monitoring probes.  This set of probes provides mission critical availability and performance monitoring of the popular commercial and home grown applications that get deployed within Windows, Linux, and UNIX (Solaris) cluster configurations.

In clustered environments, the NimBUS cluster probe can be integrated with these application probes, meaning monitoring profiles are automatically migrated along with the monitored applications whenever the Microsoft or Veritas cluster service initiates a scheduled failover.