Brad’s Short-list for Connect Cluster SaaS Monitoring Options

There are many options on the monitoring theme that are worth considering when trying to decide how to keep trach of Connect server resources in a cluster. Articles describing clustered environments are on the Connect Users Community : http://www.connectusers.com  Simply search the User’s Community using the keywords: cluster, pool, edge, SSL, etc.

To effectively monitor your Connect cluster SaaS options can sometimes be cost effective than home-spun solutions; here are some staff picks with some commentary:

Sumologic– It resembles Splunk. The main difference is that Sumologic is hosted and managed externally and Splunk is hosted and managed on-premise. With Sumologic, there is not any need for software licensing, hardware investments or internal administrator expertise.  Splunk offers a similar service called splunk>storm, but it is not as mature as Sumologic and lacks some of the alerting capability found in Sumologic.

Loggly – An alternative to Sumologic could be Loggly which offers a similar service; it seems that the alerting service is not exactly built in.  It requires a little more work and is called AlertBirds.

Note: It is possible to take an on-premise option like Cacti and port it to Sumologic, so you could effectively kill 2 birds with one stone.  You can setup a forwarder in 30 seconds and be searching the logs in no time at all.

Monitis – Provides capabilities similar to those of Nagios along with external monitoring.  The Monitis community writes custom monitors thereby enriching the options.

LogicMonitor – An alternative to Monitis could be something like LogicMonitor.  You may be able to port your existing Nagios checks over to it (check and verify).  This si a simple solution, installing the monitor and having basic checks like CPU, Memory, Bandwidth, Disk Usage, Disk IO and external ping, http, https and udp monitors setup would take all of 20 minutes.

Pingdom– An alternative to RedAlert at a lesser cost.  It is trusted by millions and is easy to use and has more endpoints than comparable options.  It takes five minute setup.

The beauty of a SaaS monitoring solution is that you do not need to worry about scaling your monitoring solution every time you scale your Connect architecture.  You can have a single solution for 20 Connect Clusters vs having to add Cacti servers, Nagios servers, Splunk architecture and licensing to handle the additional monitoring needs commensurate with expansion.  With a SaaS solution, there in not any build-out time.  You can literally have 20 monitors up and running in under an hour, and work on adding additional ones at your leisure in between casts with your new Deceiver 8 Fly Combo.

With reference to basic on-premise monitoring, make sure you use standard perfmon counters for things like CPU, Memory etc. For meeting count and meeting user monitoring you may use the FMSAdmin API with scripts to make various calls and then parse the data and pass it to an option such as Cacti.  To insure robustness, the FMSAdmin service should be restarted routinely. You could also use similar counters to pull data directly from the Connect database, but this is not without risk as Connect updaters and upgrades can introduce changes that may require rework of your custom counters.