eG Monitoring
 

Measures reported by XenUptimeTest

In most virtualized environments, it is essential to monitor the uptime of XenServers hosting critical server applications in the infrastructure. By tracking the uptime of each XenServer administrators can determine what percentage of time a server has been up. Comparing this value with service level targets, administrators can determine the most trouble-prone areas of the virtualized infrastructure. In some environments, administrators may schedule periodic reboots of their XenServers. By knowing that a XenServer host has been up for an unusually long time, an administrator may come to know that the scheduled reboot has not occurred. The XenUptime test included in the eG agent monitors the uptime of the XenServer.

Measurement Description Measurement Unit Interpretation
Rebooted Indicates whether the XenServer host has been rebooted during the last measurement period or not. Boolean If this measure shows 1, it means that the host was rebooted during the last measurement period. By checking the time periods when this metric changes from 0 to 1, an administrator can determine the times when this host was rebooted.
Uptime Indicates the time period that the XenServer host has been up since the last time this test ran. Secs If the XenServer host has not been rebooted during the last measurement period and the agent has been running continuously, this value will be equal to the measurement period. If the host was rebooted during the last measurement period, this value will be less than the measurement period of the test. For example, if the measurement period is 300 secs, and if the host was rebooted 120 secs back, this metric will report a value of 120 seconds. The accuracy of this metric is dependent on the measurement period - the smaller the measurement period, greater the accuracy.
Total_uptime Indicates the total time that the XenServer host has been up since its last reboot   This measure displays the number of years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds since the last reboot. Administrators may wish to be alerted if a host has been running without a reboot for a very long period. Setting a threshold for this metric allows administrators to determine such conditions.

Note:

If a value less than a minute is configured as the TEST PERIOD of the XenUptime test, then, the Uptime measure will report the value 0 for Xen servers (only) until the minute boundary is crossed. For instance, if you configure the XenUptime test to run every 10 seconds, then, for the first 5 test execution cycles (i.e., 10 x 5 = 50 seconds), the Uptime measure will report the value 0 only; however, the sixth time the test executes (i.e., when test execution touches the 1 minute boundary), this measure will report the value 60 seconds. This way, every sixth measurement period will report 60 seconds as the uptime of the host. This is because, the XenServer reports uptime only in minutes and not in seconds.