Server Health Monitor
Overview
MyClient helps you sleep easy by monitoring your Ahsay servers, checking for issues every few minutes. When an issue is detected, MyClient can send an alert by email or SMS, or run any custom event handler action.
MyClient includes several separate monitors, helping ensure that you only get alerts when there is a real problem. Each monitor can be enabled for individual servers from the Manage Servers page. When you are working to troubleshoot an issue, you can defer alerts for up to 36 hours.
Server Health Monitoring is available on the MyClient Small Business and MyClient Enterprise plans.
Available Monitors
Each of the following monitors can be enabled or disabled on a per-server basis.
Server Ping Monitor
The simplest monitor, this monitor checks to see that the server is connected to the internet and responding to HTTP(s) requests, and measures the latency of requests. You may view current and historical Server Ping information via the "Latency Monitor" page - latency data is recorded even if this monitor is not enabled.
Please note that despite the name, this monitor is based on HTTP(s) not ICMP.
Server API Monitor
This monitor requests OBS information for specific users on the backup server. Use the Manage Servers page to add usernames to monitor. We strongly recommend adding one user for each User Home directory attached to the server. This monitor therefore ensures that OBS is responding to data connections and that all User Homes are available.
Server RDR Monitor
If an AhsayOBS backup server is attached to an AhsayRDR server, it is important to also check that RDR is working correctly. This monitor makes a request to RDR for all the configured usernames, and checks that RDR points the request back to this server. This ensures that RDR is available, responding to connections, and delivering correct results to your customers.
Figure 1. Server Health Monitor options on a backup server
Configuring Alerts
MyClient emails the "Administrative Alerts" contact addresses when any of the above monitors fail. You may configure the "Administrative Alerts" contact addresses from the Manage System Behaviour page, on the Alerts tab.
SMS
If SMS support is configured for your installation, MyClient sends an SMS message to all of the "Alert SMS addresses" contacts when any of the above monitors fail. For more information on configuring SMS support, please see Configuring SMS Support ».
Preventing false positives
To prevent any transient issues from interrupting your support staff at odd hours of the night, MyClient waits for two consecutive monitor failures before sending an SMS alert. MyClient allows using this behaviour also for email alerts, but we do not recommend this in this case - the monitors use the same processing code as MyClient itself, so if monitors are in a failing state, it is very likely that sync processes elsewhere in MyClient will be failing to work correctly.
Event handlers (MyClient Enterprise)
As well as the above preconfigured alerts, MyClient allows you to run any event handler in response to a server monitor failure. This includes sending email and SMS notifications, but also posting to an external URL, adding diagnostic notes and tickets, and even managing backup accounts and operators.
Each of the above monitors has an associated event source that is triggered upon failure. Simply use the "Server Health Monitor" event sources from the Manage Event Handlers page to handle health monitor failures.
Additional Ping Target
The Additional Ping Target feature allows you to apply the Server Ping Monitor to a target that is not necessarily a backup server. This allows you to make use of MyClient's integrated monitoring and alerting features as well as the Latency Monitor graphs for your non-backup server targets.
This feature allows use of either ICMP or HTTP(s).
You can add an additional Ping Target via the Manage Servers page > "Add a new server" > "Ping Target" button.
Alert on API error
As well as the server-health monitoring features above, MyClient supports sending an email alert when there is an API sync failure communicating with your AhsayOBS servers. This often produces specific error messages regarding individually damaged accounts or individually corrupt profiles. This feature is available for all MyClient licensees and we strongly recommend enabling this feature.
You can configure this feature via the System Behaviour page > Alerts tab > "Send alerts for Sync errors" option.
This option is complementary to the health monitor systems described above. Neither system is a replacement for the other.