Monitoring WCS Cluster with Munin

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Munin is a nice alternative to IBM nmon script or homegrown scripts to monitor various parameters on WebSpehere commerce cluster, I have recently configured it with one of my virtual machines with a single node WCS cluster and was astonished with the simplicity of configuration and abundance of system monitoring data that it generates.
Although this blog entry is foccused on monitoring WCS cluster, you could practically monitor anything using this tool
Here are some of the cool features of Munin when compared to other commercial grade tools or IBM nmon

#1 Munin maintains a history of various servers stats and this can be very useful while debugging performance issues on an environment.
#2 Munin comes with tons of plugin to monitor, if you don't find one writing a custom plugin is trivial task.
https://github.com/munin-monitoring/contrib is a good place to look for plugins.

#3 Since Munin is running all the time, you don't have to stop / run or maintain a history of server monitoring paramaters

Step 1: Install Munin Server

Install munin client and server on the same machine, typically on a production environment you will install munin server on a different machine and every box with WAS/WCS server will have a munin client installed

Following instruction is for Redhat 6, CentOS 6, Oracle Linux 6 and above
for other linux distributions please check http://munin-monitoring.org/wiki/LinuxInstallation

Add Repository so that yum can find munin package, run these commands as sudo or root user

I plan to install munin server on one of my existing WCS IHS servers, you can practically install it on any other dedicated box as well and configure it with any webserver of your choice E.g. nginx
Following are the steps to install munin server and edit munin configuration to include wcs servers that needs to be monitored, you can add as many servers as you like as long as they are configured with munin client


Here are the instructions to include it with IBM IHS server, Edit httpd.conf used by WCS IHS server
E.g. opt/IBM/WebSphere/CommerceServer70/instances/demo1/httpconf/httpd.conf
Ad add following entry immediately before any existing <Directory> entry

With this we have a munin server installed, next we need to install munin node (collectors) on every WCS box.


Step 2: Install Munin Client on WCS nodes


$rpm -Uvh http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
$yum -y install munin-nod


Step 3: Access Munin Control Center

Launch Munin console with your favorite browser, E.g. http://<hostname>/munin
you will be surprised to see the amount of data it collects without installation of any additional plugins, needless to mention if you like to collect more stats you can install plugins or do yourself a favor by adding one.

Following are some of the default stats collected by Munin.










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