Overview
The TimeLine Alerting Option extends the TimeLine performance monitor by letting you create and customize alerts that monitor a wide variety of performance and availability conditions in your database servers.
Major benefits include:
- Customizable monitoring of key database server performance, availability and exception criteria
- Alerts can execute custom notifications and actions
- View and navigate alerts together with SQL and performance data in the TimeLine window
- Apply global alert definitions to groups of servers at once
The TimeLine Alerting Option is available for SAP Sybase ASE, SAP Sybase IQ, SAP Sybase Replication Server and Microsoft SQL Server.
Features
The TimeLine Alerting Option lets you define alerts that monitor a variety of key indicators in your database server, including:
- Database and O/S performance metrics such as CPU usage, cache misses, blocking, disk and network I/O, etc.
- Availability indicators such as server and database online/offline status
- Configurable resource usage (user connections, locks, etc.)
- Space usage and availability at the database and filesystem level
- Error log notifications and exception conditions (server I/O errors, stack traces, etc.)
When an alert event is triggered, the details of the event are saved to compressed flat files, along with the other data captured by TimeLine and SQL Capture. You can also gather and save custom information from the server using your own SQL that gets executed when an alert triggers.
Then, you can view alert events together with performance levels, database process activity and SQL executions (when used with SQL Capture) using TimeLine’s intuitive graphical interface.
Global alerting features let you define an alert and apply it across a group of servers at once. Reports identify which alerts are in use and on which servers, to make management of large server farms easier.
Technology
The TimeLine Alerting Option uses data that typically is already being gathered by TimeLine for performance monitoring purposes, so there is no additional overhead imposed on the monitored database server in these cases.
Many of the TimeLine alert types make use of data that is gathered completely outside the database server (for example, error log-based alerts and operating system performance alerts). So in these cases, no overhead at all is incurred within the database server.
Monitoring the database server through several sources provides additional robustness that cannot be achieved by simply querying the database server. This is where conventional monitors fall short–if the database server is having problems such that it becomes unresponsive, typical monitors might fail to capture important events.
In contrast, the TimeLine Alerting Option can still gather and alert on data from a variety of sources (e.g. network sniffing, error logs and operating system state) even if the database server goes completely off-line.
Customers have told us that in cases like this where a database server outage occurred and no other monitoring tool was able to tell them what happened, ProActive DBA was the proverbial “last man standing” and was able to identify the culprit!
Database Support
As mentioned above, the TimeLine Alerting Option supports a number of database server types.
Some alert types work across many or all supported database types–for example, the Blocking Detail Alert, the OS CPU Utilization Alert, the OS Filesystem Free Space Alert, and the Database Error Log Text Alert.
In other cases, alerts are provided that are specific to each database server type. Some examples of these database-specific alerts are listed below.
SAP Sybase ASE
- Spinlock contention percentage
- Replication Agent status
- Transaction log held open
- Data and log segment space usage
- Lots more!
SAP Sybase IQ
- Active versions count / size
- Space utilization in the IQ Main and IQ Temp stores and individual DBSpaces
- IQ engine threads used / available
- Catalog database and log file space availability
- Lots more!
SAP Sybase Replication Server
- Replication end-to-end latency
- Down replication paths / threads
- Rep Server memory usage
- Replication partition usage and growth rate
- Lots more!
Microsoft SQL Server
- Database filegroup space used / free
- Long-running open database transactions
- Page life expectancy
- Lock waits and timeouts
- Lots more!