Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services (2nd Edition)

Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services > 18. Monitoring > Proactive Monitoring

Proactive Monitoring

Although it is certainly important to learn of directory service failures as soon as they occur, it's even better if you can identify and head off problems before they cause your service to fail or perform poorly. This technique is called proactive monitoring. The goal of proactive monitoring is to catch problems early and fix them before your users notice them.

Problems with directory services (and many other types of services) often arise when a system becomes overloaded. There are many ways that this can happen. For example, as a directory service becomes more popular and used more widely, the number of simultaneous client connections may increase dramatically. Or an upgrade to a directory-enabled application such as a messaging server may place a greater load on the directory service. A well-designed, proactive monitoring strategy can identify trends that, if left unchecked, would eventually cause a noticeable problem with the directory service.

Analyzing the log files produced by your directory server software is a good way to identify trends in the usage of the service. For example, you might write a Perl script that reads the access log generated by the Netscape Directory Server. This script might count the number of search operations performed by the server each hour and write the summary to another file. This summary data can be reviewed periodically to identify trends. Many other types of information can be obtained and analyzed using this general approach. For example, you could count the number of update operations processed by a server, or you could keep a running average of the elapsed time of each operation processed by the server.

It's also a good idea to proactively monitor the quality of your data. For example, if your directory is synchronized from some authoritative data source such as a PeopleSoft HR database, you may want to check whether the data in the directory matches the data in the HR system. Discrepancies indicate that the synchronization process is not working correctly. You can also monitor the quality of data that the directory itself is the authoritative data source for.

For example, you might check whether email addresses in the directory are in the correct format. More information on monitoring data quality via data validation techniques can be found in Chapter 17, "Maintaining Data."

Index terms contained in this section

data

         quality

                    proactively monitoring

directories

         monitoring

                    proactive 2nd 3rd 4th

log files

         monitoring

                    proactive monitoring

maintenance

         preventive

                    proactive monitoring 2nd 3rd 4th

monitoring

          proactive

                    data quality

                    log file analysis 2nd

preventive maintenance

          proactive monitoring 2nd

                    data quality

                    log file analysis

proactive monitoring 2nd

          data quality

          log file analysis

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