Managing data providers

Go to the Monitoring Data Providers page on the IBM Cloud Pak console to quickly view the status and other information about all the data providers in one view, for both agents and Unified Agent plug-ins. For agents data providers, you can dynamically change the default configuration to customize which data an agent collects and posts to the IBM Cloud Pak console server. For both Unified Agent and agent data providers, you can get online and offline alerting and configure the cleanup settings for offline data providers.

View data provider instances

  1. Go to Administer > Monitoring on IBM Cloud Pak console, and click Monitoring data providers.

  2. On the Instances tab, a table of data provider instances that are sorted in descending order is displayed. The table includes the following information about each data provider:

    • The Name of the data provider.
    • The Type of data provider.
    • The Version of the data provider.
    • The Hostname is the data provider host.
    • The data provider Status is either online or offline. Offline data providers are listed at the start of the table.
    • The Time last changed is the last time there was a recorded change for the data provider in the topology service.

Change data collection for agents

For agents, you can view the list of metrics, and identify which metrics are currently collected by the provider and which metrics are not currently collected. You can enable or disable metric collection for the selected agent and specify the collection interval. To change the default configuration of the data provider type, do the following steps:

  1. Go to Administer > Monitoring on IBM Cloud Pak console, and click Monitoring data providers.

  2. Click the Defaults tab, a table of default configuration of the data provider types is displayed. You can dynamically change data collection and posting of agents by changing the default settings.

  3. Click Edit from the overflow menu at the end of each data provide type. The Edit provider defaults page is displayed. It lists the provider type name, description, and table of Metrics and properties.

  4. In the table of Metrics and properties, you can see the list of collectable fields and the collection setting that is yes or no.

  5. Set Yes or No in the Collect data column. For the changeable fields, in the Collect data column, select Yes to start collecting the data for that field, or select No to exclude this field from the data collection process. After the field is modified, a star key * is displayed after the label of the toggle switch, for example, Yes* or No* .
    Note: Some fields are immutable and always shown as Yes. These fields are pre-set fields and cannot be changed. To view system preset fields, type "yes." in the filter box.

    • To see a list of all modified fields, type * in the filter box.
    • To see a list of modified Yes fields, type yes* .
    • To see a list of modified No fields, type no* .

  6. Change the interval time of the data collection. In the table of Metrics and properties, click the value in the Interval column to edit. Then, specify the interval time in the Set time interval window. The collection time is in minutes and the minimum value is 1. After you set the interval time, the interval of all fields belong to that group is updated.
    Note: The original default interval time for the agents is displayed in the Set time interval window. You can change back to the original default time by typing the number and then click OK.

  7. To discard all changes, you can click the Restore defaults button.

  8. To save the changes, click the Finish button and then click Save in the Confirmation window. After the configuration is saved, the web browser is returned to the Monitoring data providers page and the Time last changed column is updated for the modified provider type. You can then view the added metrics in Custom metrics of the provider Resources.

Clean up the offline data providers for Unified Agent, runtime data collectors, and agents

For the data providers of Unified Agent, runtime data collectors, and agents, you can configure whether to clean up the offline data providers and related resources after a period of time by specifying the two parameters monitoringDeploy.global.agentmgmt.provider.autoRemove and monitoringDeploy.global.agentmgmt.provider.ttl. The default value for monitoringDeploy.global.agentmgmt.provider.autoRemove is true and default value for monitoringDeploy.global.agentmgmt.provider.ttl is 24. It means that the offline providers and related resources are automatically removed if they remain offline for 24 hours.

You can reconfigure the parameters during Monitoring installation or upgrade. For example, you can set monitoringDeploy.global.agentmgmt.provider.autoRemove as false, which means that automatic cleanup for offline data providers is disabled and nothing is automatically removed. You can also set monitoringDeploy.global.agentmgmt.provider.ttl to other numbers. For instructions, see Monitoring configuration.

Event behavior for offline and online data providers