Friday, January 23, 2009

Sun Management Center - Sun's Ways of monitoring


"Sun Management Center", a product from Sun Microsystems for monitoring the Spark and x86 hardware running Solaris and Linux. It provides in-depth monitoring and diagnostics of servers and its services. Sun MC is based on server-agent model.

Architecture
Sun Management Center software includes three component layers: console, server, and agent. The product is based on the manager and agent architecture:

Console layer: Console layer is the interface to end users. It exposes web, JWS and console interfaces. Mutiple user can access the same Sun MC at the same time.

Server layer: server is the core, which talks to Console layer and agent layer. It acts as the central repository and stores data(both historical and current). It includes the components such as configuration manager, event manager, topology manager etc., Sun Management 4.0 uses PostgreSQL(open source) db to store data whereas the previous version 3.6 uses Oracle to store data.

Agent layer: Agent layer monitors, gather information about the server/system in which it is deployed and it communicates from server using SNMP(modules are used for gathering monitoring data. Different modules are used for different purposes). Agent apart from monitoring, also has the cabability to manage the nodes. The agent uses rule (it will get from server layer) to raise the alarm if the rule is not met.


Modules: Modules are the components in agent layer responsible for monitoring. They can dynamically loaded, invoked, started, stopped and unisntalled in Sun MC. Kernal reader, file scanning, directory scanning, config reader, fault manager, print spooler, process monitoring are some of the modules.

Like nmon, Sun MC is free to download and use (you can pay and get support). Like Glance for monitoring HP machines, Sun MC can be used to monitor the Sun based systems. Next time when you are planning to do performance testing, tuning on Spack or x86 hardware running Solaris, try Sun MC.

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