Novell Open Enterprise Server Administrators Handbook SUSE Linux Edition [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

DSTrace with iMonitor

Now that you have been introduced to the most common eDirectory processes, its important that you know how to keep track of the health and general operation of those processes. To do this you can use iMonitor. iMonitor is presented in Chapter 5, "OES Management Tools," as one of the principal management tools for OES Linux. However, this section focuses on the iMonitor options for monitoring eDirectory processes and activities. Refer to Chapter 5 for information on iMonitor installation, general interface, and additional capabilities. For detailed feature information, see the OES Linux online documentation. iMonitor is a web-based replacement for several of the console-based management utilities used with previous versions of NetWare, including DSBrowse, DSTrace, and DSDiag. Because the eDirectory processes discussed previously run on each eDirectory server, iMonitor provides a server-level view of eDirectory health as opposed to a tree-level view. You can view the health of processes running only on the server from which you are running iMonitor. To view another server, launch iMonitor from that server.

Prior to using DSTrace from iMonitor, you must configure the utility and specify the activity that you want to monitor. This is accomplished from the Trace Configuration page, shown in Figure B.1.

When you go into Trace Configuration, you will see four new links in the left navigation frame: Trace Configuration
This is the default view you will see when entering the Trace Configuration page. From this page, you can define the server-based eDirectory events and processes that you want to trace. The following configuration options are available from this page:

Trace On/Off
Enables/disables DSTrace monitoring. When DSTrace is enabled, you will see a Trace button (big lightning bolt) in iMonitors header frame that you can use to view the active trace (see Figure B.2).

NOTE

DSTrace can increase CPU utilization significantly and reduce performance, so you should trace only when you are actively looking for something, and not as a standard practice.

Update
Applies new configuration options to an existing trace.

Trace Line Prefixes
These options let you specify what type of descriptive information to include with each trace line. These prefixes allow you to identify event sequence, group related messages together, and determine how long ago a problem occurred. This can be critical when analyzing DSTrace data, particularly historical trace data.

DSTrace Options
Specifies the eDirectory activities that you want to trace for this particular eDirectory server. In order to control the amount of data that you will have to sift through in DSTrace, its best to restrict tracing to only those specific events that are of interest instead of tracing everything. Table B.1 provides a brief description of many of the common trace options.

Event Configuration
This link provides a view similar to Trace Configuration, but it lets you select eDirectory events that you want to trace. eDirectory events include such things as adding/deleting objects, modifying attributes, and changing a password. The same configuration options described for Trace Configuration are available for Event Configuration, except that instead of listing DSTrace options, DS Events are listed. Trace History
From this page you can view a list of previous traces. A timestamp indicating the period of time during which the trace was gathered identifies each trace. Trace Triggers
This page lists some common DS Agent activities and identifies the DSTrace options that must be selected in order to trace that type of DS Agent activity. Selecting trigger options and clicking Submit will add those DSTrace options to the list of active DSTrace options, if they are not already active.
Although the web-based DSTrace utility within iManager is the recommended method of monitoring eDirectory activity, there is also a command-line version of this utility called ndstrace. This utility is shown in Figure B.3.

After starting the ndstrace utility, you are presented with an NDSTrace: prompt. From this prompt, ndstrace can be configured to display eDirectory events as they are occurring on the server. Some of the commonly monitored events are described in Table B.1. With the ndstrace utility, events are configured using the event tag as listed in the second column of Table B.1.

To enable or disable specific events within ndstrace, execute the following command from the utility command prompt:

ndstrace +/-[Option Tag]
Multiple options can also be specified on the ndstrace command line. For example, to enable Inbound Synchronization and disable Obituary messages, execute the following command:

ndstrace +SYNC -OBIT
For more information on using ndstrace, enter help ndstrace from the ndstrace command prompt, or see the man page for ndstrace.