In this article, I will be covering a feature requested quite often by system administrators – ability to monitor system load parameters of the AgilePoint NX cluster. It is pretty common for bigger enterprises to have a load balanced environment with multiple AgilePoint servers in a cluster. As part of AgilePoint NX V9.0 product rollout, a new web-based administrator screen to monitor all the instances of AgilePoint NX server, within the same cluster is now available.
System admins often monitor the servers in a cluster using third party tools for performance parameters like CPU usage, RAM usage, disk space, up time etc. However, those tools mainly give infrastructure level statistics only. It is equally important to monitor what is going inside the process thread which is hosting the AgilePoint engine. This is where Cluster Server Manager (CSM) module comes in.
Lets first understand the usage of Cluster Server Manager module which will be monitored by Cluster Monitor. Cluster Server Manager module plays a key role in the overall performance of a clustered environment where it provides process level load balancing on top of the regular network load balancing. It makes sure the process load is equally distributed between the various nodes in NLB for better utilization and performance of the cluster. It also ensures that if a process is already loaded in memory of node 1 and if NLB device sends next request to node 2, it internally routes that to node 1 to avoid unnecessary wastage of memory and faster execution as node 1 already has the process image loaded. In case one node fails, CSM module transfers all its executing processes to other node in the cluster seamlessly. Hence monitoring the execution of CSM module is essential.
The Cluster Monitor provides key statistical information of all the nodes in the cluster. This includes information about the server node, memory utilization, processes and threads, average event execution time, database connections and more. The administrator can record the performance of the entire cluster for a given time period and download the same for further analysis.
In past, this was provided as a server side WinForms application but that meant system admin had to login to VM to run the utility. Starting AgilePoint NX v9, we will be providing this information right within Manage Center.
It is important to note that the access to this screen is based on user permission. Only authorized users can access it. Next, this option in the Manage Center gets enabled, only when using a clustered environment with multiple nodes. If your deployment includes Disaster Recovery, the server nodes from the other sites will not be shown.
Note: Please note that this video is recorded while this feature is in beta version. Some of the labels and icons might change by the time it goes GA but the general concept of configuring these activities would remain the same.