Chapter 19. Monitoring

• Introduction to Monitoring

• Selecting and Developing Monitoring Tools

• Notification Techniques

• Taking Action

• A Sample Directory Monitoring Utility

• Performance Analysis

• Monitoring Checklist

• Further Reading

• Looking Ahead

To deploy a reliable directory service that meets your users' expectations, you need to develop and implement a monitoring strategy. Your monitoring system should help you attain three main goals:

1. To quickly detect and be able to remedy failures of your directory service

2. To anticipate and resolve potential problems before they result in failure

3. To understand the usage patterns of your directory to aid you in capacity planning

In this chapter we first discuss general monitoring principles and the various types of monitoring strategies you might use. Then we cover the various types of monitoring systems available, including off-the-shelf network monitoring systems and custom monitoring tools. Next we cover the topic of notification, in which you inform the appropriate people about any problems detected. Then we discuss how to proceed when a failure or degradation of service is detected . We provide a simple monitoring tool, written in Perl, that you can use as a starting point for developing your own custom monitoring system, and we conclude with a discussion of performance monitoring and analysis.