Accessing Cassatt Active Response Data for Use By Third-Party Monitoring Software
Intended for use with Cassatt Active Response V5.0.
Many enterprise sites use a system monitor such as HP’s OpenView Performance monitor, IBM’s Tivoli Monitoring, or some other enterprise monitoring solution. These are great tools for detecting system bottlenecks or critical problems. You are probably thinking that it would be nice to use these tools to monitor what’s going on inside the Cassatt Active Response environment. If so, you have come to the right article.
To show you some key information about connecting a monitor to Cassatt Active Response, I'm going to use a free monitor, the MC4J Management Console, from sourceforge. By following how to set up MC4J to access monitoring information available within the Cassatt Active Response environment, you should be able to infer necessary details about how to set up your own monitoring application.
Note that the primary focus of this article is on accessing monitoring data exported by Cassatt Active Response via the Java Management Extensions (JMX). However, I will spend a little time on Cassatt Active Response's Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) monitoring data as well.
MC4J is a Java-based management console. It can be used to connect to application servers such as WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss, Tomcat, and others that expose system information via Java Management Extensions (JMX). MC4J is free for use, making it a good candidate for our sample monitor setup. The point is not so much to expose all the nifty things MC4J can do, but to highlight the setup steps that are likely common in connecting any monitor to the Cassatt Active Response environment.
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If you have read the companion article, Understanding Monitoring Collectors, you may remember that Cassatt Active Response collects a range of monitoring data about the status of node hardware and software running in the Cassatt Active Response environment. Cassatt Active Response collects this data via a range of protocols and specifications, including JMX, SNMP, HTTP, and ICMP. Cassatt Active Response normalizes and stores this data in an internal database that is accessible to external monitoring applications.
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To begin, install MC4J from http://mc4j.sourceforge.net/Download.html. Note that you will also need a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed. If necessary, download one from http://java.com/en/download/help/download_options.xml. The installation should only take you about as long as it takes to drink your morning coffee... as long as you don't guzzle.
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Setting up a server connection
After you have installed MC4J, you need to create a server connection to the Cassatt Active Response control node. This step is roughly equivalent to configuring a general purpose monitoring application to connect to a JMX-based data source.
To make a server connection in MC4J, use the Create Server Connection icon on the toolbar. Doing so launches a connection wizard, which prompts for the following server connection parameters:
Server Connection Parameters
In this field... |
Select or Enter... |
Notes |
|
JSR160 |
JSR160 is the Java Management Extensions Remote protocol, which is the required protocol for connecting to the Cassatt Active Response control node to retrieve JMX-based data. |
Name |
A name of your choice for this connection. |
|
Initial context factory |
Accept the default. |
Other monitoring applications may specify a different context factory than does MC4J. For setup of other monitors, use the context factory provided as part of your monitoring application's implementation of JSR160. |
Server URL |
service:jmx:rmi://
VIP-ddress:1098/jndi/rmi://
VIP-address:1099/collage |
|
Principle |
A valid Cassatt Active Response user with administrative privileges in the Cassatt Active Response environment. |
Cassatt Active Response provides a default administrative user named admin. Alternatively, you can enter any user in your Cassatt Active Response system who has administrative privileges. |
Credentials |
A valid password for the principle user. |
Cassatt Active Response provides a default password, changeme, for the admin user. |
Click the Finish button after you have supplied these parameters and you are ready to open a connection in MC4J.
Although setting up Enterprise monitoring applications such as OpenView or Tivoli may be more complicated than this simple MC4J wizard, these settings should be relevant to setting up any monitor to access Cassatt Active Response monitoring data.
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Defining your monitoring view of Cassatt Active Response
MC4J provides default views of the monitoring data available. However, you can also define custom monitoring views referred to as dashboards. Cassatt provides a sample monitoring dashboard that displays a customized view of the underlying monitoring data. This dashboard is defined by the following XML file:
Cassatt_Dashboard.xml
Place this file in your mc4j-install-dir/dashboards/tomcat/ directory and it will be available for use after you open a connection to a Cassatt Active Response control node. If you're interested in actively using MC4J to monitor Cassatt Active Response, you can use this XML dashboard definition as a base for defining a custom dashboard that matches your own interests in the Cassatt Active Response environment.
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Opening a connection to a Cassatt Active Response control node
The control node is the hub of the Cassatt Active Response environment. Among its many roles, the control node collects monitoring information within the Cassatt Active Response environment and provides it to external monitoring applications. By opening a connection to the control node with MC4J (or your monitoring application of choice), you can view any of the monitoring data collected by the control node about specific application nodes in the Cassatt Active Response environment, as shown in the following figure.
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To use MC4J to view JMX-based data collected by the Cassatt Active Response monitoring collectors, right-click the icon for the server connection you configured and select Connect. Then, expand the tree:
MBeans » com.cassatt » type=Components » id=com.cassatt.model.TierNodeSlot--ID
The tree should look something like this one:
Tree Hierarchy in MC4J
Each id-com.cassatt.model.TierNodeSlot--ID represents a node in a tier. Select any one and expand its Attributes to see the individual data provided by the Cassatt Active Response JMX monitoring collector:
Mbean Attribute View in MC4J
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This is where the monitoring dashboard comes into play. If you put the Cassatt_Dashboard.xml in the mc4j-install-dir/dashboards/tomcat/ directory, you can launch that dashboard view. Right click the node id and select the Cassatt Dashboard view form the available dashboards:
Launching a Dashboard View
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Unlike JMX, which exposes monitoring attributes via Mbeans, SNMP monitoring attributes are defined by an underlying specification called a Management Information Base (MIB). The Cassatt MIB is a text file that resides on the control node in the /cassatt/opt/mibs/CASSATT-SYSTEM-MIB.txt.
The next figure shows the structure of the Cassatt MIB, which conforms to the Structure of Management Information version 2 (SMIv2) standard. Click the image to magnify the figure.
Cassatt MIB
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Viewing data from the Cassatt MIB
You can view SNMP monitoring data defined by the Cassatt MIB without setting up a full-blown SNMP-based monitoring application. Standard Linux utilities like snmpwalk can connect to the SNMP connector in Cassatt Active Response to retrieve MIB data (refer to the figure Connecting to a Control Node).
First, copy the MIB text file (CASSATT-SYSTEM-MIB.txt) from the control node to your workstation. For example, you might put the file in /dir. Then you would target the control node as follows:
| This command argument... |
Specifies... |
| -v2c |
The protocol version to use. Cassatt Active Response supports both v1 and v2c. |
| -M +/dir:/usr/share/snmp/mibs |
The directories on your workstation where MIBs should be referenced; in this case, /dir is the directory where you put the Cassatt MIB text file. |
| -Of |
Include the full list of MIB objects when displaying an OID. |
| -c public |
The read community. |
| VIP-address |
The virtual address that is commonly shared by the control nodes in a dual-control node configuration. (If you are using only one control node, use its IP address or host name.) |
| 8161 |
Port number; note that SNMP traffic on the control node is redirected from the standard port 161 to port 8161. |
|
|
The Cassatt object identifier (OID). |
The command returns a list of data, which you can correlate to the Cassatt MIB elements in the last diagram.
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Acknowledging that enterprise monitoring applications are complex to configure, I don't expect that I've answered all the questions you might have about how you would hook up a monitor to view Cassatt Active Response monitoring data. However, I hope to have highlighted some of the key server connection details and the data exported by the Cassatt Active Response JMX and SNMP monitoring. Also, by setting up MC4J and providing a custom Cassatt Active Response dashboard view, I have given you a fairly simple monitoring view that you can expand on if you are so inclined.
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