No application server and application will run forever. Leaks in OS processes, memory, files, and other shared resources will eventually require it to be restarted before it crashes. This in the past has been an expensive manual monitoring and OS administration evolution.

Now, more advanced load balancer products can include a ‘health check’ feature that provides automated checking and preemptive actions that avoid hard fail-over situations. The bulk of monitoring and OS image and application server administration available for you includes:

  • Pinging PAS for OpenEdge and the OS image to verify their health and ability to continue servicing client requests and connections. The purpose is to identify a struggling application server or OS and permit it to be removed from service before it crashes and affects application data.
  • Remove any single PAS for OpenEdge application instance, that fails its health check ping, from the pool of load balanced application servers before it crashes. Once removed from the pool and the application server becomes idle, it may be stopped, maintained, and restarted.

Monitoring includes the OS images in your application architecture. OS images should be monitored for performance and health (CPU, Memory, SWAP, Disk space, Disk I/O) and errors in system logs. Networks should be monitored for collisions, retransmissions, routing, latency, and other performance issues, not just from the outside but between machines internally. PAS for OpenEdge instances should monitored for errors, memory leaks, and client response time performance. There are a multitude of monitoring values for PAS for OpenEdge using REST API or JMX beans. The OpenEdge HealthScanner can monitor your PAS for OpenEdge instance health and work with a load balancer’s health check. Databases should be monitored for performance, replication performance, and overall health. Logs should be monitored for errors and warnings.