Monitoring Sybase SQL Anywhere

The Sybase SQL Anywhere sensor is automatically deployed and installed after you install the Instana agent.

Supported versions

Instana supports only Sybase SQL 17.

Configuration

Driver Installation

Due to licensing reasons, Instana can not provide automatic Sybase SQL Anywhere monitoring. Only Sybase (SAP) can distribute the driver (jConnect) jar for Sybase SQL connection.

When the agent starts and discovers a Sybase SQL Anywhere Server where the driver has not been supplied, the agent will log this message:

2019-06-24T12:19:03.248+0200 | ERROR | heduler-thread-4 | Sybase | 137 - com.instana.discovery-sybase - 1.0.0 |
Cannot monitor Sybase without the driver jconn4-7.0.jar
2019-06-24T12:19:03.248+0200 | ERROR | heduler-thread-4 | Sybase | 137 - com.instana.discovery-sybase - 1.0.0 |
For license reasons it cannot be provided by Instana and needs to be manually obtained and added to the agent

The driver usually comes as jconn4.jar and it needs to be renamed into jconn4-7.0.jar, that way Instana agent will know how to resolve that dependency.

To add the driver to the agent, add it to this location: <agent_install_dir>/system/com/sybase/jdbc4/jdbc/jconn4/7.0/jconn4-7.0.jar

Server Connection

In order to enable in-depth metric monitoring, you need to inform the Agent about the credentials to access monitoring information. Server name should be unique in the 'servers' list. It is sufficient to provide access credentials to one of the databases on a desired server.

The user must have system privileges to access the database. Role name: SYS_AUTH_DBA_ROLE.

GRANT ROLE SYS_AUTH_DBA_ROLE TO grantee
WITH ADMIN OPTION
WITH NO SYSTEM PRIVILEGE INHERITANCE;

You can configure it in the agent configuration file <agent_install_dir>/etc/instana/configuration.yaml:

# Sybase SQL Anywhere
com.instana.plugin.sybase:
  servers:
    SERVER_NAME_1: #example 'server1'
      port: '' #default '2638'
      database: '' #default 'demo'
      user: '' #default is 'DBA'
      password: '' #default is 'sql'

Metrics collection

To view the metrics, select Infrastructure in the sidebar of the Instana User interface, click a specific monitored host, and then you can see a host dashboard with all the collected metrics and monitored processes.

Configuration data

  • Process ID
  • Start time
  • Port
  • Server type
  • Server version
  • Server name
  • Max connections
  • Databases

Performance metrics

Server

  • Connections
  • Disk Reads & Writes
  • Bytes Received & Sent
  • Thread Dead Locks Avoided & Reported
  • Databases

Database

  • Connections
  • Disk Reads & Writes
  • Bytes Received & Sent

Health Signatures

For each sensor, there is a curated knowledgebase of health signatures that are evaluated continuously against the incoming metrics and are used to raise issues or incidents depending on user impact.

Built-in events trigger issues or incidents based on failing health signatures on entities, and custom events trigger issues or incidents based on the thresholds of an individual metric of any given entity.

For information about built-events for the Sybase SQL Anywhere sensor, see the Built-in events reference.