Information monitored in the system dashboard

The IBM® Content Collector system dashboard runs alongside Content Collector and provides real time performance information for each task route on each Content Collector node.

It uses a subset of all the available counters you see in Performance counters. A more advanced user has the option of obtaining further information by monitoring additional performance counters by using a profiling tool, for example, perfmon.

The dashboard shows one column for each node in the current IBM Content Collector configuration: the primary node, secondary nodes, and optionally expired nodes. To show expired nodes in the dashboard, select Options > Show Expired Servers. You can delete expired servers from the configuration store by selecting File > Remove Expired Servers in the dashboard. If a server was considered expired because the IBM Content Collector Task Routing Engine service on that server was stopped, the record for the server is automatically re-created when the IBM Content Collector Task Routing Engine service is restarted.

Each task route is shown in a separate collapsible section. When a task route section is collapsed, no data is gathered for this task route.

For each node, the following information is displayed by default:

  • Server connectivity: Responding or No connection
  • Scale out status: Primary node, Secondary node, or Expired node
  • Status of the IBM Content Collector Task Routing Engine service: Starting, Running, Stopping, Stopped, or Not accessible or not found

    The status Not accessible or not found denotes that task route performance counter information cannot be obtained because the host machine cannot be reached, the information does not exist on the host machine, or permissions are restricted. If performance counter information cannot be accessed, the counter number will change from 0 to Unknown.

  • The percentage of processor time used
  • The rate at which bytes are sent and received over each network adapter
  • The total number of errors

    This value represents the total number of errors that are logged in the main Windows Application event log. These errors occur independent of a task route or collector and might not even be Content Collector related errors. For example, if the antivirus program on the machine logs an error to the Application event log, the error count for the node is incremented.

For each task route, the following information is displayed by default:
  • The name of each task route with one of the following status labels: Processing or Idle

    The status Idle denotes that the IBM Content Collector Task Routing Engine service is running and that the task route is currently monitoring collection sources but is not processing any documents. This does not imply that the collector is not running. The collector is running and is searching mailboxes for content to archive, but cannot find anything eligible for archiving.

  • The following performance counter information:
    • The total number of items that were accessed by the collector since the node was last restarted
    • The number of items per second that the collector is currently processing
    • The total number of unique documents that were created by a given task route since the node was last restarted
    • The number of unique documents per second that the task route is currently creating
  • The total number of errors that this task route has experienced on that node since the task route was created
The performance counters related to document processing are system performance counter, while the Total Errors counter monitors the total number of errors in that task route's Windows event log (CTMS - TaskRouteName) for the machine on which the dashboard is running.

Information about the status of the nodes and task routes is retrieved by examining the task route tables in the IBM Content Collector datastore. The status of a task route is determined by examining whether the throughput-related counter value is increasing in value, and whether the IBM Content Collector Task Routing Engine service is started on the node in question.