by Rolando Bazoalto 

For System Center Forum readers that might have missed our first blog posts, this is Jalasoft’s fourth article about Xian Io’s functionality in a series of eight. Prior posts discussed the monitoring of network device interfaces, port status, a device’s response time and asynchronous monitoring. On this occasion we’ll talk about the monitoring of processes since it is a fairly useful feature unbeknownst to most of our customers.When monitoring UNIX servers, it is important to continuously monitor hardware components like CPUs, interfaces and memory. However, what to do with applications running in a server that also need to be monitored? Fortunately Xian Io gives you a chance to monitor processes and daemons running on a UNIX server.

But how can Xian users monitor processes in UNIX servers? It is quite easy! When configuring the add device rule in the Xian Io console, besides the IP address and port, you can as well discover daemons and processes. To do so, you must select this option in the “add device wizard” of the Xian Io Console and decide on a search criterion to discover the processes (See figure 1). For example, if you would like to monitor all your processes, set the “*” value as the search criterion. If you need to monitor all your sendmail processes, set “*sendmail*” as a criterion. Finally, if you were interested in monitoring only a single process, set the exact name of this process. On the other hand, to add multiple search criteria, just separate them with commas ‘,’.

Once the discovery process is completed, you’ll be able to see the list of processes and daemons that you have selected. Xian Io has three monitoring rules for processes: Process CPU usage percentage, Process memory usage percentage and Process status (See figure 2). You can use all of these rules to notify/warn you when your process is down or if it is using too much memory or CPU. This way you can be warned on time that your sendmail service is down or whether it is using too much memory (which could reflect a spam problem), or even more importantly, Xian Io could notify you that your firewall service is down. If you have any critical enterprise software running on your servers, you could monitor it as well.

Process monitoring is available in Xian Io and distributed with all our UNIX servers smart management packs (SMPs), such as our SMPs for Linux, Solaris and AIX Servers.

If you have any questions or comments please reply to this post, and we’ll make sure to send you an answer as soon as possible, alternatively you could send us an e-mail to techsupport[at]jalasoft.com. For further information on Xian Io for Ops Mgr 07 please visit our website http://www.jalasoft.com/.

Figure 1: Discovering Processes and Selecting a Search Criterion:

Figure 2: Monitoring Rules for Processes Available in Xian Io.