Generic server monitoring with Monitis & M3

Had I been told to monitor a cat chasing a mouse with Monitis, my answer would have been – “Yes, it’s probably possible”.
With the not-so-recent addition of M3 to the arsenal of monitoring tools Monitis can utilize, it is possible to monitor anything. However this alone is far from being enough. Smart implementations of proper applicative monitoring is what should be practiced.

New feature provides significantly faster insight and root cause analysis

SAN JOSE, Calif., February, 15, 2012 – Monitis, the leading cloud and web application monitoring software provider, today announces that it has added comprehensive MySQL database monitoring to its award-winning Application Performance Management & Monitoring platform. The robust Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tool enables users to gain significantly faster insight when conducting root cause analysis.

The MySQL monitoring feature includes 246 monitoring variables and more than 21 different metrics to provide one of the easiest to use, yet comprehensive database monitoring tools available. It was first introduced into the free Monitor.Us platform back in June last year and has seen the code battle hardened by many hundred free users over the last 8 months.

Copenhagen, February 14, 2011– Monitis, the award-winning provider of the world’s first all-in-one cloud-based service that combines web site uptime, server and application monitoring, today announced the deployment of a new monitoring node in Denmark.

This will provide companies whose business relies on the Web, a complete and accurate performance picture from the perspective of both Danish and international web site visitors.

The addition of this node brings the total number of Monitis monitoring nodes operating around the world to 17.  Monitis’ nodes across the US, Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America monitor clients’ key IT processes every 60 seconds – offering fast and frequent checks, as well as alert notifications into the health of servers, networks, applications, events, cloud storage facilities, cloud platforms, websites, transactions and other processes.

Unleashing the power of M3 & timers

During the lifespan of M3 (Monitis Monitor Manager) there has always been something lacking – timers.

M3 execution procedure was outlined in this previous article.

The execution mentioned in the latter was a one-time-execution, whereas server monitoring requires periodic invocation of monitors in order to actually provide counters over time, graphing performance.

The periodic invocation method suggested up until today was to integrate M3 with crontab.

Crontab, in a nutshell, is a Linux/Unix service for periodic invocation of executables. Implementing M3 with crontab properly meant M3 would run every X minutes, producing a Monitis counter update every X minutes, should everything run properly.

In the following article I’ll outline the changes done to support timers in M3.

In this article we’ll go into VDI (virtual desktop interface) monitoring on Windows Server Hyper-V and in particular what and where to monitor and what counters to utilize to determine of your virtual machine is overloaded and what resources are used. This article focuses on measuring networking, storage, and CPU usage.

Windows Hyper-V has three main components, each of which can be monitored; the virtstack, devices, and the hypervisor. When Windows 2008 boots the system it launches the virtstack and hypervisor. The virtstack handles the emulated devices, manages virtual machines, services I/O, etc. The Hypervisor schedules the virtual processors, manages interrupts, services timers, and controls other chip-level functions.

Pluggable M3 (Monitis Monitor Manager) Framework

Who needs an introduction about M3? – Perhaps no one!
After gaining some reputation with M3, providing extra-easy integration of any monitor into Monitis it was time to take it to the next level.

Generally speaking, the work flow of M3 was described in detail in this article.

After some thought and design, we’ve decided it’d be best if M3 was pluggable. Pluggable in terms of being able to easily add execution and parsing plugins.
The interface and behavior of M3 stayed exactly the same, however now it is much easier to obtain data from any source and parse the data the way you want it.
Saying that, it was time to put the new design for a test. We tried to integrate the DBI support into M3.
Guess what – it was much easier than expected!

In our last article we discussed performance tuning of Hyper-V storage I/O. In this article we’ll focus on network I/O performance best practices.

Hyper-V supports synthetic and emulated network adapters in the virtual machines, but in general the synthetic devices offer much better performance and also reduce CPU overhead. Both types of adapters are connected to a Hyper-V virtual network switch. If you need external network connectivity you can connect the virtual switch(es) to a physical network adapter.

Let’s start by taking a look at synthetic network adapter configuration.

In our last article we focused on tuning processor and memory, and in this article we’ll look at tuning the performance of Hyper-V and in particular at aspects that of the storage system used by your Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V solution.

Supported Technology

Hyper-V supports so-called synthetic and emulated storage devices in virtual machines, where the synthetic devices generally offer better throughput and response times as well as reduced CPU overhead. The exception to this statement is if a filter driver can be loaded and reroutes I/Os to the synthetic storage device. Virtual hard disks (VHDs) can be backed by three types of VHD files or raw disks. This article describes the different options and considerations for tuning storage I/O performance.

This is our second article in our series about tuning performance of your Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V environment. In our first article we discussed the considerations you should make when selecting the hardware components for your Hyper-V server(s).

We mentioned in our first article that the way the hypervisor virtualizes the physical processors is by time-slicing between the virtual processors. Obviously, moving a workload into a virtual machine increases CPU usage. In this article we’ll discuss how to optimize the processor(s).

Often times when implementing a monitoring solution where, and how to get started can be overwhelming.  It can be especially overwhelming with powerful tools, because you can truly monitor anything.   This series of articles will take a look at some strategies to implement monitoring into your company in a stepped approach, as well as how Monitis can make your life easier.

Overview:  Start Small and Go Big!

Getting started with some monitoring tools can be pretty risky and require an investment that you may not feel comfortable making.  You may find out too late that it does not meet all of your needs.  With Monitis and a stepped approach, there is little to no risk in getting started.  Monitis is “Month to Month” and you pay only for what you use.  Getting started takes only a few minutes, but where should you start?