Clusters can be an extremely powerful tool for IT administrators to ensure application availability and performance. However, if left unmonitored, a well-performing cluster can easily obscure any hardware or software failures that degrade the cluster’s redundancy. Accurate monitoring of cluster health is therefore crucial in maintaining added value.
Uptrends Infra now provides powerful tools to keep track of your Windows Failover Cluster, allowing you to preemptively fix problems before your users notice anything is wrong. We’ll show you how to get started.
In order to perform accurate measurements on the cluster as a whole, we recommend using an Agent on a server that is outside the cluster. Follow the normal procedure for agent installation.
Two additional steps are then required before you can start creating sensors:
Once this is done, you can use the newly created Device to configure sensors that apply to the cluster as a whole (rather than one particular server).
Depending on your needs, you may also want to measure the performance of all nodes in your cluster individually. There are no special considerations; just add devices on a central agent or install local agents on each node as desired (using the normal procedure).
When your cluster works well, you might not notice when one or more nodes fail – until it’s too late. By constantly measuring how many servers are available at any given time, you can rest assured that your cluster can deal with sudden failures of hardware or software.
It’s often useful to detect which node is currently hosting the services in a given resource group. In the future, you will be able to receive alerts whenever this value changes (i.e. when a manual or automatic failover occurs).
Note that it is currently not possible to receive alerts when this sensor type detects a node change (failover). This functionality will become available in a future release.
In addition to the clustering-specific sensor types, you can add most of the other available sensors to the Cluster Device. Such sensors will then automatically perform their measurements on whichever server is currently hosting the configured IP address for the device. If the IP Address Resource is correctly defined in the same Resource Group as your applications and services, the measurements are always taken on the node that currently owns that group.
The following Microsoft articles should help you configure your clustered servers to accept incoming WMI queries from the Uptrends Infra Agent for monitoring purposes.