Chapter 15: Monitoring for High Availability

Overview

One of the challenges of making your systems highly available is ensuring the capability to verify your environment s health in terms of its current availability. Because it is always better to be proactive than reactive, you should be alerted when something occurs. Ultimately, management will want reports of your system s availability and possibly performance statistics ”such as number of users per hour ”so it is in your best interests to have the tools and information to be able to generate these reports. You never want to be in a position where you have to scramble to collect that information or, worse , come up empty handed with simply verbal assurances that your systems really are available.

This chapter walks you through the approaches and processes of monitoring, based on the internal systems monitoring experience at Microsoft. Keep in mind that every environment has different experiences and capabilities for its approach to monitoring and reporting.

On the CD

For more information on monitoring disks, turn back to Chapter 4, Disk Configurations for High Availability. For performance tuning and scalability information, see the document HA_Perf_And_Scale.doc.