HCL OneDB Explore Concepts
This topic covers some of the conceptual aspects of OneDB Explore.
Group
HCL OneDB™ Explore provides the ability to create groups of servers to make them easier to manage and monitor. HCL OneDB Explore's groups are based on a hierarchy. The base “root? group is the top level group for all HCL OneDB Explore groups and servers. From this root group, you can add as many servers and sub-groups as you desire, nesting them to whatever level makes sense for your organization.
You can define monitoring and alerting profiles for groups, simplifying the task of managing monitoring for all of your database servers.
Agent
The HCL OneDB Explore agent is a lightweight Java based program that is designed to run alongside each Informix database server, gathering data about the performance of the system. The data gathered by the agent is fully configurable and is defined by the list of sensors in the server’s monitoring profile. The data gathered by the agent is stored in a repository database.
Repository Database
A repository database holds information collected by the HCL OneDB Explore agent about the Informix database server. The repository database can either be local to the database server that is being monitored or it can be on a remote Informix instance. You can define a common repository database shared by multiple Informix database server instances, or you can define a separate repository database for each monitored instance.
The repository database must be an Informix database and must exist before the agent is started. You must define the database server to be used as a repository in the HCL OneDB Explore UI, using the Add Server action on any group dashboard, before it can be defined as a repository.
To define a repository database for a particular Informix database server, go to the server's Setup page in the UI and click on the Agent tab.
Sensor
A sensor defines a metric or set of metrics for the agent to gather. An example is the “DBSpace Usage? sensor that gathers metrics on used and free space for all database server spaces.
Monitoring Profile
A monitoring profile defines the list of sensors that the agent runs to gather data about and Informix database server instance or about its host operating system.
For each sensor in a monitoring profile, you can configure the frequency at which that sensor will run and how long that sensor’s data will be kept in the repository database.
Monitoring profiles can be configured for groups as well as servers.HCL OneDB Explore uses the concept of inheritance for determining a particular server's or group's monitoring profile. All servers and groups inherit monitoring profile information from its parent group in the hierarchy. Servers or groups can also disable or override the configuration of any sensors inherited from a parent group.
Alert
An alert defines a condition that should trigger an alerting incident in HCL OneDB Explore. An example would be an alert defined for when the Informix database server goes offline.
Alerting profile
An alerting profile defines the set of alerts configured for a particular server or group. Alerting profiles follow an inheritance model similar to monitoring profiles.
Alerting incident
While the monitoring data is collected by the HCL OneDB Explore agent, it is the HCL OneDB Explore server that is tasked with evaluating alerting conditions. As data is collected by the agent, the HCL OneDB Explore server evaluates each new incoming data point against the alert definitions in the server's alerting profile. Any data point that meets an alerting condition triggers an alerting incident.
Alerting incidents are shown in the HCL OneDB Explore UI for that server. Alerting incident counts are also aggregated and highlighted on the group dashboards. Alerting incidents can be acknowledged as read or even deleted from the Incidents page in the UI. Users of HCL OneDB Explore can configure their own alerting preferences to automatically receive alerting incidents directly via email, Twilio, or PagerDuty.