Monitor the operational status of a Zylinc solution, part 5
In this post (number five of six in the series), we look at how to monitor the Zylinc solution’s Tomcat services.
Background: Many organizations want to be able to monitor how their critical IT and communications solutions perform, so that they can quickly deal with any potential problems before many users become affected. If you work in IT operations or a similar function, and your organization uses Zylinc, this blog series is for you. It covers what you need to know if you’re going to monitor the operational status of a Zylinc solution.
Tomcat is a Java-based web server. Several of the software modules in a Zylinc solution use Tomcat, so those modules need Java and an instance of Tomcat to be able to run.
You can use the Deployment Manager (that comes with the Zylinc solution) to create as many instances of Tomcat services as you need. Typically, you’ll have two instances.
Each instance can use arbitrary versions of Tomcat as well as Java. Several instances can co-exist, as long as you use distinct names and distinct network ports. You can also use the Deployment Manager to install any of our Tomcat-based software modules on any of the Tomcat instances that you’ve created.
You should monitor some network ports that the Zylinc solution’s Tomcat instances use. Generally, each Tomcat instance listens on three or four ports, depending on whether you’ve enabled support for HTTPS or not.
If you use the port numbers that the installation guide for a typical Zylinc solution recommends, you’ll want to monitor the following ports:
Tomcat instance 1
- Tcp/8005 (localhost only)
- Tcp/8009
- Tcp/8080
- Tcp/8443
Tomcat instance 2
- Tcp/8006 (localhost only)
- Tcp/8010
- Tcp/8081
If you run the port monitoring agent from another host on the network, you can’t monitor the ports marked with (localhost only). In that case, you won’t be able to monitor ports 8005 and 8006.
When you create Tomcat instances in the Deployment Manager, a Windows service is created for each instance. The Tomcat Windows services will be given names like ZyMT_ApacheTomcat_x64__ followed by the name that you’ve entered for the instance.
For all Tomcat instances that you use, you should monitor that those Windows services are running.
If you use the instance names that we recommend in the installation guide for a typical Zylinc solution, you’ll want to monitor the services that have the following names:
- ZyMT_ApacheTomcat_x64_8.0.42.0_ZyTomcat1-8080-8443
- ZyMT_ApacheTomcat_x64_8.0.42.0_ZyTomcat2-8081
Note that the version number 8.0.42.0 that I use in my example may be different on your installation.
The process name for all Tomcat instances is tomcat8.exe. To identify a process that belongs to a specific instance, you can use the PID for the running service, and compare it to the PID of the tomcat8.exe processes.
You can monitor that some of the Zylinc Tomcat-based software modules listen on their configured network ports. If more than one port exists, both ports should respond. The following Tomcat modules use a specific network port that you should monitor, if you use the modules in your organization:
Client Manager
- Tcp/35033
- Tcp/35034
Messaging Portal
- Tcp/35028
Zylinc Proxy
- Tcp/35031
Zylinc Proxy Client
- Tcp/35032
The rest of the Tomcat modules don’t listen on specific ports, but you can use active checks to monitor them. Read more about such active checks on Zylinc unified help. As usual, if you get a sign-up page when you access the link, simply fill in the sign-up form, and my colleagues in Zylinc’s admin office will give you access quickly.
In the next, and last, post in this series, we’ll look at how to monitor the availability of the SQL servers that run the Zylinc solution’s two important databases.