Monitoring Overview

HQ's monitoring functionality is all about collecting metrics. Hyperic HQ collects data (aka, metrics) from Web, application, and database environments (known in HQ as services, servers, and platforms), as well as from clients making requests of an application. This data is stored in a centralized repository and correlated according to the resource hierarchy defined in HQ (as part of the inventory model).

With this metric data, you can monitor and manage resources across the enterprise, looking for changes in behavior, stopping undesirable behavior before it becomes a problem, and generally improving resource availability. HQ's monitoring enables you to answer questions like "How busy is the Tomcat server?", "What resources are down?", and "Is the JBoss Thread count for my enterprise application server too high?"

All a resource's metrics can be viewed on the "Current Health" screen. Please consult the help for that screen for an explanation of the display.

Manually Adding Resources for HQ to Monitor HQ monitors only those resources that it has discovered and placed it its inventory. That's straight-forward enough. However, if HQ has not discovered a resource in your environment that you want to be monitored, you can manually add that resource to the HQ inventory. Learn more about manually adding resources.

Learn more about metrics and how HQ measures and displays them:

• Metrics overview
• Metric charts
• Indicator metrics
• Metric display range
• Baselines
• Problem metrics
• Events and Log Tracking
• How to get real-time, not stored, data
• Interactive network map
• Configuring resources for monitoring

If you have any comments or suggestions for this help page, please submit them at the bottom of the page by clicking Add Comment.

Metrics Overview

Metric data is the information FUSE HQ collects for a given platform, server or service. The data HQ collects depends on the type of server or service being monitored. For example, if you monitor a Linux platform, you can see metric data about total, used, and free physical and swap memory; total, idle, and user CPU; and much more. More specifically, for an instance of [Tomcat], you can see metrics like JVM total memory, active thread count and thread group count, uptime, and process shared memory time.

A metric can belong to one of the following categories:

• Availability
• Throughput
• Performance
• Utilization

Learn more about categories of metrics and the display of metrics in the HQ UI.

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Metric Charts

Metrics are displayed both in numeric form and in graphical form. Metric charts can make it easier to notice trends in a single resource's behavior and to compare the behavior of multiple resources.

Learn more about charting metric data.

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Indicator Metrics

"Indicator" metrics are those metrics displayed by default in the "Indicators" section of the "Current Health" screen for a resource. Each HQ plugin defines a set of metrics as indicators, but you can change the defined set of indicators for each resource type on the "Monitoring Metrics Defaults" screen.

To change the set of indicator metrics:

1. Click Administration in the masthead menu.
2. In "HQ Server Settings," click HQ Monitoring Defaults Configuration.
3. Click next to the resource whose indicator metrics you want to change.
4. Follow the instructions on the "Monitoring Metrics Defaults" screen for setting indicator metrics.

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Metric Display Range

The metric display range specifies the time range from which HQ collects data when it displays metrics and charts. The user-specified setting applies to metric and chart displays in all resource-monitoring screens. The display range can be changed when viewing metric (on the "Current Health" screen) or metric chart data ("Metric Chart" screen)

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Baselines

A metric's "baseline" is the value that represents the norm for that metric. You can compare the baseline against changes in the actual metric data in order to perform trending analysis, manage SLAs, and monitor overall application health as a form of fault management.

HQ continuously and automatically calculates the baselines for dynamic metrics it is collecting for a resource: it averages the observed metric values over a user-specified time frame. (HQ also calculates the high and low values for the metric.) You can also simply manually set the baseline and the acceptable high and low values (effectively setting the acceptable range of values). You can set and chart these values when you chart a metric for a resource.

To configure the calculation of the baseline metric:

1. Click Administration in the masthead menu.
2. In "HQ Server Settings," click HQ Server Settings.
3. Follow the instructions on the "Edit HQ Server Settings" screen.
   

   Automatic Recalculation and Replacement of Baseline Values Hyperic HQ will still automatically recalculate and replace user-specified baseline values depending on the Baseline Frequency setting to ensure that a baseline is always current to the data being collected.

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Problem Metrics

FUSE HQ automatically tracks when the observed value for a metric falls outside of the high and low range (that is, out-of-bounds, or OOB) set in the baselining process. Such OOB metrics are considered "problem" metrics and are displayed as such in the Dashboard's Problem Resources portlet and in the resource's "Current Health" screen (on the tab). (The portlet displays a count of OOB occurrences of the metric. This count is reset when you establish a new baseline). In addition, when the collection of a metric triggers an alert, the alerting event is also tracked as a problem metric occurrence for that resource.

Resources with problem metrics in the specified time range are considered "problem resources."

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Event and Log Tracking

Each HQ plugin defines its own set of events and logs that HQ can track (for example, user logins, Windows registry key changes, and error logs). Individual resource can be configured so that HQ tracks its events and/or logs in "Resource Configuration" screen. Once tracking is enabled on a resource, all tracked events, logs, control actions, and alerts appear in the "Events/Logs Tracking" section on the "Current Health" screen's tab. Furthermore, alerts can be defined to be triggered by a specific event or log entry.

To configure an individual resource's event and log tracking:

1. While viewing a resource's inventory, in "Resource Configuration," click
2. On the "Resource Configuration" screen, follow the instructions for configuring event and log tracking.

How to Get Real-Time, Not Stored, Data

Most of the monitoring data available to the user for viewing in the Monitoring screens is stored. The Live Data feature provides real-time data. Learn more about Live Data.

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Interactive Network Map

The HQ UI provides an interactive network map that displays how a resource fits into the inventory model: all the resources that it hosts, and the resource that hosts it. This map is available when viewing any individual resource, for example, on the "Current Health" screen.

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Configuring Resources for Monitoring

Some resources require additional, user configuration in order for HQ to do anything more than detect them. For example, a JBoss server might require a username and password; the user must provide those two values to HQ so that it can authenticate to the JBoss server.

If HQ is unable to authenticate to or sufficiently monitor a resource, provide additional configuration for the resource on the "Resource Configuration" screen.

To configure a resource for monitoring:

1. While viewing a resource's inventory, in "Resource Configuration," click
2. On the "Resource Configuration" screen, provide the resource-type-specific information necessary to sufficiently connect to and monitor the resource.

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Return to the User Manual.