Chapter 9 -- Working with Monitors and Events

Chapter 9

This chapter focuses on using the Microsoft Application Center 2000 (Application Center) event and health monitoring features, as well as creating custom monitors to meet your specific monitoring needs.

In This Chapter

The Event Schema

The Monitors Hierarchy

Anatomy of a Monitor

The Default (Synchronized) Monitors

The Sample Monitors

Creating a Custom Monitor

Modifying and Creating Actions

Configuring Event Logging

Application Center continuously records and displays information about the functional state of your cluster and its members. Event and monitoring data, which is gathered from several sources, provides immediate information about member health and availability. In addition, this information can be used to flag potential problems that are developing on a cluster or cluster member.

The following data sources constitute the core of cluster monitoring:

• Events, which are generated by a range of objects, services, and applications within the Application Center environment.
• Microsoft Health Monitor 2.1 data collectors, which are management objects that collect data for a particular process or service.
• Performance counters, which gather data about how often, or how much of, a specific resource is used.

These data sources are implemented through:

• Microsoft Windows 2000 events, which you can use to determine the functional state of Application Center and Windows 2000.
• Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), which provides a comprehensive and extensible management infrastructure for applications, services, and objects in Windows 2000.
• Health Monitor, which sends events and executes actions in response to monitoring policies.
• Application Center, which generates its own events about numerous cluster activities, such as synchronization and cluster membership.

NOTE

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Application Center also collects and persists all the data gathered by the preceding data sources.

Before dealing with monitoring and monitors in more detail, let's look at the event and monitors schema that you have to work with if you decide to implement custom monitors for your cluster.