System Monitoring for HTTP Servers service

The System Monitoring for HTTP Servers service is a shared service that collects performance and availability data in HTTP server environments.

You can deploy the System Monitoring for HTTP Servers service in a cloud group to collect performance and availability data from HTTP servers that are running on virtual systems. The shared service uses a monitoring agent to collect the data from these servers.

The monitoring agent is dynamically installed and configured on supported platforms if the shared service is deployed in the target cloud group. You do not need to take any additional action to enable the monitoring agent.

For example, suppose that your organization has a development cloud group in which the System Monitoring shared services are not deployed, and a production cloud group in which the services are deployed. If you deploy the same pattern to each of these cloud groups, only the deployment to the production cloud group will have monitoring installed.

You can deploy the System Monitoring for HTTP Servers service in a cloud group at any time. For supported patterns that are deployed after the shared service is deployed, the monitoring agent is added to those patterns at deployment time. For supported patterns that are already deployed in the cloud group, those patterns can discover the shared service and install the monitoring capabilities later. This discovery of the shared service happens with a background process running in the deployment that periodically checks for any monitoring shared services that were not detected at deployment time. Running this background process can lead to a delay of up to one hour before an existing deployment will react to the deployment of the System Monitoring for HTTP Servers service.

The System Monitoring for HTTP Servers service does not have any virtual machines associated with it. Without this association, you cannot stop, start, or upgrade the service. You can only deploy or delete the service.

The version of the System Monitoring for HTTP Servers service that is deployed determines the version of the monitoring agent that is running on every deployment in the cloud group. When you deploy the service, the monitoring agent is installed in the appropriate virtual machines. When you delete the service, the monitoring agent is also deleted from those same virtual machines. To upgrade to a new version of the service, you must delete the existing service and then deploy the new version.

At certain stages in the lifecycle of the deployment, the monitoring agent must reconfigure itself. To complete this configuration, you must restart any HTTP servers that are to be monitored. If you enable monitoring in a deployment, HTTP server instances are restarted by default in the following situations:
  • You deploy the virtual machine.
  • You reboot the virtual machine.
  • You start or restart the System Monitoring shared service in the same cloud group as the deployment.
  • You deploy the System Monitoring for HTTP Servers service in the same cloud group as the deployment.
  • You manually start the monitoring agent after it was manually stopped previously.

You can control the restarting process of HTTP server instances by selecting an option on the user interface when you deploy the System Monitoring for HTTP Servers service. The option is enabled by default so that you do not have to restart servers manually every time that you perform a deployment or an upgrade. If you disable the option when deploying the service, you must manually restart every individual HTTP server instance so that the monitoring agent can reconfigure itself.

You can stop the monitoring agent manually and restart it later. When you manually stop the agent, the state of monitoring is stopped. This is important because, after you manually stop monitoring on a deployment, the IBM® Cloud Pak System Software service does not automatically restart monitoring on that deployment. This behavior is different from a lifecycle-initiated stop of monitoring, which triggers a paused state. The service provides a deployment option to force all deployments on the cloud group out of stopped state, returning them to the normal lifecycle management process of system monitoring.