System Dashboard for Enterprise Content Management

Listener

Receives a stream of events and other performance information from an application, and sends the data to a Manager for analysis and storage. A listener is the equivalent of an SNMP agent and offers clients the ability to optionally accumulate and aggregate performance data over some time period. A listener waits passively for Managers to connect to it and to inquire about its performance counter values. In the absence of a Manager connection, the presence of a listener component is nearly invisible to an outside observer. Dashboard offers Java™ and Microsoft C++ implementations of the listener.

Data exposed by a listener falls into one of three categories: environmental, static, and dynamic.

• Environmental data is information about the application's operating environment, such as the operating system name and version number, the number and type of CPUs, the amount of available memory, and so on.
• Static data is specific to the application that is implementing Dashboard features, but does not change as the application runs. Examples of static data are the application's name and version number. Static data for Java applications also includes information about the Java Runtime Environment, such as its version number, maximum memory, and so on.
• Dynamic data includes data supplied by the operating system, such as CPU load, in-use memory, network traffic, and so on, as well as application-specific data (counters, durations, and other data provided by the application to the Manager). Consequently, the amount and type of dynamic data varies depending on the level of instrumentation that is implemented in the application, and it can change from release to release of the product.

Manager

Connects to and retrieves reports from a listener and processes the collected data, such as storing it, displaying it graphically, or using it to perform other application-specific tasks. Dashboard provides two Managers: Dashboard and Archiving Manager.

Dashboard

Displays performance statistics.

Archiving Manager

Saves historical or real-time data collected from the listeners in a cluster to files that you can subsequently load in the Dashboard for analysis, reporting, and so on.

The following diagram depicts the overall architecture of the Dashboard:

TCP sockets connect the dashboard and the listeners. Each listener maintains a history of its application's events. Managers can request this historical information at any time. The dashboard automatically requests this history as soon as it connects to each listener. A listener's history can be saved for later analysis by using the dashboard or a stand-alone archiving manager.