A large part of maintaining a continuous operation is having a way to extensively monitor your application architecture, and being able to take preemptive or retroactive action when a problem arises. OpenEdge Management is a tool that you can use to monitor your systems to run your application continuously.

OpenEdge Management is a powerful tool that you can use monitor, alert, and trend almost every facet of your application architecture. OpenEdge Management can easily be extended to do even more monitoring and take corrective action when an alert occurs by using its programmatic capabilities. For continuous operation, you can use OpenEdge Management to monitor your network resources, your local and remote systems, file, database, and PAS for OpenEdge resources. OpenEdge Management provides feedback about each resource it monitors based on performance criteria that you establish. If a resource's performance does not meet the criteria you set, then you determine the action OpenEdge Management takes. Those actions can be as simple as sending an email or in-application alert, or as complex as creating a new instance of PAS for OpenEdge.

While your application architecture might be made up of several systems and components, there are a number of resources that you should monitor to ensure that your application and system runs continuously. When you are determining which resource to monitor, think of each critical system and component that act as linchpins for your architecture. In general, you should monitor key resources like:

  • Your database
  • Your system resources, such as CPU, memory, or disk
  • A network resource, such as HTTP communications
  • A file resource, such as a log file
  • Your PAS for OpenEdge instances

In OpenEdge Management, you select the resource you want to monitor, and create a monitoring plan for those resources.

Main steps: Monitor your resources

  1. Create a monitoring plan.
  2. Set rules.
  3. Configure alerts.
  4. Create a collection.
  5. Create trending reports.

For more information, see Resource monitoring with OpenEdge Management.

Create a monitoring plan

When you create a monitoring plan, you provide both a monitoring definition and one or more rule definitions.

The monitoring definition includes:

  • The schedule selected from all the schedules that are available. The schedule specifies when the plan is active, and the available schedules include only those schedules that do not overlap with schedules already in use for a resource.
  • A polling interval, which indicates the frequency with which this resource's rules are checked by OpenEdge Management.
  • An option to enable alerts for this resource. Enabling alerts means that alerts are generated while the plan is active.
  • An option to store, or trend, the performance data collected by this resource to the OpenEdge Management Trend Database while the plan is active.
The number of polls after which performance data is trended to the OpenEdge Management Trend Database.

The rule definition identifies:

  • When to generate an alert for the resource
  • What level of alert severity cause OpenEdge Management to generate an alert
  • The number of failed polls after OpenEdge Management generates an alert
  • The action that OpenEdge Management performs when an alert is generated
  • The number of successful polls after OpenEdge Management clears an alert
  • The action OpenEdge Management performs when an alert is cleared

A schedule defines a block of time for which a set of monitoring rules is active for a resource. When you add a monitoring plan to a resource, you specify the schedule to indicate when the monitoring plan is active.

OpenEdge Management provides several predefined schedules. You can use the schedules as they are, or you can modify them to suit your operating needs. You can also use an existing schedule as the basis for a new schedule by changing its name and characteristics.

Set rules for continuous operation

Rule definitions identify the specific attributes of a resource that you want to monitor, the severity of an alert OpenEdge Management generates in response to performance, and the action that occurs when an alert is generated. You set specific rules for each resource type. For example, the rule definition for a disk resource includes setting an alert that triggers when disk activity exceeds a specified percentage.

For more information, see:

Configure alerts for continuous operation

An alert is an automatic, user-defined process that occurs in response to a rule violation on a monitored resource. You create actions and associate them with rules to ensure that certain activities occur when the rule triggers. You use these actions to send e-mails, record the occurrence of an alert in a log file, send an Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) trap, or perform a combination of these activities.

For more information, see Alerts in OpenEdge Management.

Create a collection

In OpenEdge Management, you can create one or more groups of resources, known as collections. When you create a collection, you typically group resources together that have a common element, like all the database resources used by one division in your company or all the resources that support one particular application. When you group resources, you can more easily examine their details and assess their status.

For example, you might create a collection known as Collection A that includes all resources that a particular application depends on. Because you have more than one application, you then create another collection known as Collection B, which is also dependent on one of the resources in Collection A. The common resource to both Collection A and Collection B in this example is disk space. Within these two collections, you can set an alert to notify you of rapidly filling disk space. When the alert fires, you are notified that both collections, and by extension, both applications, are at risk. This notification enables you to quickly determine the extent and the effect of a potential failure and to take action to avoid that failure.

For more information, see Create a collection.

Create trending reports

You can choose to have OpenEdge Management trend performance data to the OpenEdge Management Trend Database. Different trend expectations exist for different resource types. Therefore, each trend interval has a different meaning depending on the data to be trended.

If you set a trending value in the Trend Performance Data every field, OpenEdge Management uses the value you provide in combination with the value in the Polling Interval field to calculate the trending interval. For example, if you initially the polling interval for 30 seconds and also set the trending value to trend data every 3 polls, OpenEdge Management will automatically calculate the trending interval as 90 seconds. You will see this result when you view the summary of the resource monitor's performance. If performance falters, then you can take corrective action before the problem that is causing performance issues becomes catastrophic.

For more information, see Understand reports.