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!

This article is the second article in our series about SharePoint. In our first article we provided a few SharePoint basic system performance counters that you can use to monitor the overall health of the server itself that is running SharePoint; a requirement before you can monitor SharePoint effectively and detect and identify possible bottlenecks. In this article we’ll discuss SharePoint monitoring more in depth and provide some best practices.

SharePoint 2010 offers a number of built-in monitoring features for diagnosing problems and performance. By default diagnostic logging is enabled and while most of the time these default settings will be sufficient, there might be times when you want to make changes to these settings. For example, if you are making a major change to your environment, you can configure a more verbose level of logging to track more closely if everything is working as planned.

In previous articles, we learned how to access Performance Counters metrics, how to access SQL Server data, and also how to add a Monitis page with multiple External Monitors. In this article we will put everything together and create a Monits page with the most important parameters for monitoring an SQL Server in production.
When monitoring an SQL Server installation, it is important to keep monitored the most basic metrics such as Processor and Disk. There are also several important metrics specific to SQL Server, as well as the size and the usage of databases and logs.