Sentinel
Server performance is the key factor in maintaining database
availability. Poor performance of mission-critical database applications
means lost revenue and business opportunities. A great part of managing
your IBM Informix® database servers infrastructure involves performing
regular administration tasks, responding to unexpected system events and
keeping your servers tuned for optimal performance.
To help DBAs optimize database resource use, performance and
availability, Sentinel™ automates proactive 24 × 7 operational
monitoring of IBM Informix® DBMS servers, provides an extensive array of
sophisticated diagnostics tools to tune critical performance parameters,
executes regular database maintenance tasks, enables setting of highly
flexible multi-level alerts to flag availability and performance
degradation problems and manages autonomic responses to server events in
real time — all from a centralized point of control. Continuous
time-series measurement data of the server’s performance, system alert
events and task execution status flags obtained by Sentinel™ can be
recorded in the built-in SQL-compliant repository for subsequent
analysis.
Key features include:
Performance Monitoring - Sentinel’s Performance
Monitors enable you to track critical parameters of your IBM Informix
servers, such as CPU utilization, paging-out rate and the I/O transfer
rates for the various disks on your system, to identify peak-use levels,
peak-use intervals and heavily loaded resources. Similarly, you can
monitor fragment use, to determine if your fragmentation scheme is
configured correctly. A Sentinel™ monitor is a named collection of
Informix server performance measurement parameters, related event alert
conditions, object filters and real-time graph definitions. Each monitor
is defined against a single Informix server instance. In creating a
monitor, you can select desired performance tracking parameters from a
matrix of approximately one hundred (~100) available measurement
parameters at the server, table/index, physical storage or user session
levels.
SQL Capture - Sentinel’s SQL Capture is another type of
a monitor which allows you to periodically retrieve SQL statements
running on the IBM Informix server. You can explicitly specify, which
SQL statements have to be retrieved based on session user login name,
client host, Informix session ID, or SQL statement’s execution
statistical parameters, such as estimated cost, estimated number of
retrieved rows or number of sequential scans. Retrieved SQL statements
can be displayed on the screen in real time and/or recorded in the
Sentinel™ performance history repository SQL database for further
analysis.
Event Management - Alerts provide a mechanism for
notifying you when one or multiple IBM Informix server performance
parameters exceed user-defined threshold levels or the monitored
database instance goes off-line. Each user-defined alert has its own
severity, a list of notification methods and optional action or a task
that should be automatically executed when this alert event is
triggered. Multiple alerts can be created for the same IBM Informix
server parameter to differentiate between various severity levels.
Job-level alerts notify you about scheduled or alert-triggered job
failures and system-level alerts that report about Sentinel internal
errors or events, such as the Sentinel server shut downs. All alert
events are always logged into the Sentinel™ performance history
repository. Sentinel sends alert events in real-time to the appropriate
connected Server Studio™ JE Administrator clients and can issue alert
event notifications via email, mobile phone or pager text messages, if
the user chooses such option as part of the alert notification
condition.
Task Automation - Sentinel provides powerful task
automation facilities in a form of user-defined jobs. A job is an
executable action, which can be either OS command or SQL script. It can
perform any useful task, such as a database server backup, UPDATE
STATISTICS operation or collection of OS environment information when
database server performance degrades below a specified threshold level.
You can easily define most of your existing server administration
scripts as Sentinel™ jobs. With a centralized console, you do not have
to switch between multiple telnet terminal sessions and memorize
different physical script names and directories on different hosts.
Sentinel™ provides you with a single centralized facility under which
each job has clear logical name, description, last and next execution
time, current status and execution history. Highly flexible job
scheduler enables automation of daily database administration tasks. To
provide autonomic responses to IBM Informix server events, Sentinel
enables fully automated execution of a predefined job in response to
specific Performance Monitor alert threshold event.
Performance History Repository - Sentinel™ comes with
built-in SQL database Performance History Repository that stores all
parametric time-series performance data and alerts collected by
Performance Monitors, SQL statements collected by SQL Capture processes
and the record of all executed jobs from all monitored database
instances. Using highly intuitive graphical analytical tools and direct
query tools built into Server Studio™ JE, you can examine any data set
stored in the repository, either as time-series chart or hourly, daily
or monthly histogram to perform diagnostic analysis and profiling of
your system's resource-utilization, or you can export Performance
History Repository data for external analysis.
Sentinel™, together with
Server Studio™ JE,
provide wide-ranging functionality to support your organization’s vital
IBM Informix® databases — from initial design, development and testing,
all the way through to production deployment and successful operational
service.
For more details, contact your Kazer representative.
