OnSupport Remote Monitorinng
In addition to providing Informix product support and maintenance, Oninit ®provides advanced remote monitoring services for Informix. These are considered vital for businesses that have limited Informix resources, but are using an Informix-based application to support their business. In order to provide these support services, we use a suite of database server monitoring products from AGS, Nagios and in-house scripts. These tools allow Oninit ®to evaluate and resolve problems on the customer system remotely which reduces the time taken to resolve issues.
Basic system monitoring
Changes in the memory usage can often be overlooked and sudden changes in the usage pattern are typically an indication of a system alteration, or maybe an application problem.
By monitoring of physical and logical log usage it is possible to identify changes in the overall system load. This change could be an indication that transactions are misbehaving, poor SQL. etc.
Specific metrics monitored include but are not limited to
- Basic system monitoring
- Inspection of O/S process reports
Basic Informix performance monitoring and tuning
- Analysis of disk I/O
- Monitoring of SQL and user level activity
- Inspection of system memory allocation and usage
- Inspection of physical and logical log usage
- Cache rates
- I/O per disk
- I/O per chunk
- Concurrent user count
- Lock conflicts
- Memory Usage
- Logical turnover
- Checkpoint Interval
- LRU Contention
- Monitoring of storage requirements
- Logical and physical disk usage
- Fragmentation
Physical Space Monitoring
Physical disk utilization and placement of logical entities have a direct bearing on the overall system performance but over time the original relationships and assumptions may no longer be valid. In the ideal world the I/O for all the disks should be equal.
Informix allocates disk space for tables in extents. While there is a maximum number of extents that can be allocated to a table, the limit is unlikely to reached in the later engines. But excessive extents are an indication of a badly designed table. By monitoring the number of extents it is possible to identify tables that are growing outside the assumed business projection.
By monitoring the growth of tables and the extent utilization it is possible to determine when more space must be allocated and ensure that the space is created in a timely manner.
Correct fragmentation policies will dramatically reduce the system I/O and will speed up SQL performance.
Specific metrics monitored include but are not limited to
- Table growth
- Anticipated future disk requirements and required dates
- Extents per table
- I/O per fragment
Customer custom metrics
These will be developed as the contract progresses and are designed to monitor Customer specific issues and concerns
When Oninit ® remote monitoring service is implemented a number of thresholds are identified that allow the system to alert our support desk to conditions that may need further immediate attention. These thresholds will be tailored to the Customer so that false alarms are not raised. In addition the system is reviewed weekly by a consultant who will identify key areas that may need further administrator attention. Before any work is performed on a live system, the work is documented and approved.
Access to the required systems will be determined and detailed separately, but Oninit ® will comply with any security requirements specified by Customer. Any expense associated with these requirements will be charged at cost to Customer.
Live Statistics
Existing customers can see their table and index statistics live.
Informix & Grafana
We believe Informix remains one of the most capable and reliable database platforms available today. At the same time, we're big fans of Grafana and its powerful approach to visualizing operational and business data over time through intuitive dashboards, charts, and alerts.
Unfortunately, Grafana does not include native support for Informix as a data source. Rather than accepting that limitation, Oninit decided to solve the problem ourselves.
Over the years, we've developed not one, but three different Informix data source integrations for Grafana, each designed to meet different deployment requirements and use cases. Whether you're monitoring system performance, tracking business metrics, or building executive dashboards, these plugins make it possible to bring Informix data directly into Grafana's rich visualization environment.
You can download our Informix Grafana data source plugins below and start building dashboards from your Informix databases in minutes.