Application performance monitoring with Hyperic HQ
System of Logical Defaults
Hyperic makes application metrics available with little to no configuration through the use of a system of logical defaults. Most application monitoring requires a special additional suite of software, which can be tedious to implement. On the other hand, Hyperic HQ out of the box can collect the most relevant performance and service metrics for the most commonly used software and do so with little to no need for manual configuration.
Monitoring Best Practices
A best practice is to monitor only the services and applications that are of importance to the administrator; otherwise, the data becomes less effective under the weight of irrelevant information.
Also, make sure you establish a strategic alerting and escalation policy by configuring alerts that meet multiple conditions. This approach will prevent unnecessary 3am wake-up calls alerting you to a single server that is out of disk space on /tmp. Keep your alerts from "crying wolf."
It takes a significant amount of time and tuning to get a proper monitoring policy that works. Often you'll need a period of at least one or two weeks to narrow down the proper alerting thresholds and identify what you need to monitor. My recommendation is to identify the critical business or organizational processes in order of priority and then map which IT infrastructure services support those processes. From there, you can draft and test a monitoring and alerting policy. In the first phase, alerting thresholds and monitoring metrics should be loose. Over the course of a week or so, identify any unnecessary items, and remove them one at a time.
If the monitoring policy is targeted and well designed, the one or two week grace period provides a fairly simple and smooth transition. Starting with an open, noisy monitoring and alerting policy ensures that monitoring metrics and alerts that would normally be of interest are not accidentally filtered out.
Conclusions
The primary difficulty in performance and enterprise monitoring is extending the solution into all of the particulars of a custom application, the database, and web servers that typically require a suite of expensive, proprietary monitoring tools. Hyperic brings a new era to enterprise monitoring by focusing on deep, application-specific performance metrics and making them virtually free of the need for configuration.
Hyperic HQ is supported by a community. In addition to the built-in support for more than 70 common products, other plugins for additional products and technologies are available from the HQ community site. The HQ server itself is open source, so anyone can modify and contribute to the code; however, most developers contribute to the project by creating plugins for new applications and new server types.
Hyperic HQ does an impressive job of application monitoring and removes the need to spend long hours scripting custom application-specific monitoring tools or to purchase expensive, third-party alternatives.
Infos
- Hyperic HQ installer: http://www.hyperic.com/downloads/index.html
- Cfengine: http://www.cfengine.org
- Xen: http://www.xen.org
- JBoss Community: http://www.jboss.org/
- MySQL: http://dev.mysql.com/
« Previous 1 2 3
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you've found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Zorin OS 17 Beta Available for Testing
The upcoming version of Zorin OS includes plenty of improvements to take your PC to a whole new level of user-friendliness.
-
Red Hat Migrates RHEL from Xorg to Wayland
If you've been wondering when Xorg will finally be a thing of the past, wonder no more, as Red Hat has made it clear.
-
PipeWire 1.0 Officially Released
PipeWire was created to take the place of the oft-troubled PulseAudio and has finally reached the 1.0 status as a major update with plenty of improvements and the usual bug fixes.
-
Rocky Linux 9.3 Available for Download
The latest version of the RHEL alternative is now available and brings back cloud and container images for ppc64le along with plenty of new features and fixes.
-
Ubuntu Budgie Shifts How to Tackle Wayland
Ubuntu Budgie has yet to make the switch to Wayland but with a change in approaches, they're finally on track to making it happen.
-
TUXEDO's New Ultraportable Linux Workstation Released
The TUXEDO Pulse 14 blends portability with power, thanks to the AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS CPU.
-
AlmaLinux Will No Longer Be "Just Another RHEL Clone"
With the release of AlmaLinux 9.3, the distribution will be built entirely from upstream sources.
-
elementary OS 8 Has a Big Surprise in Store
When elementary OS 8 finally arrives, it will not only be based on Ubuntu 24.04 but it will also default to Wayland for better performance and security.
-
OpenELA Releases Enterprise Linux Source Code
With Red Hat restricting the source for RHEL, it was only a matter of time before those who depended on that source struck out on their own.
-
StripedFly Malware Hiding in Plain Sight as a Cryptocurrency Miner
A rather deceptive piece of malware has infected 1 million Windows and Linux hosts since 2017.