Monitoring application endpoints and services
IBM® NS1 Connect® supports multiple methods for tracking key availability and performance metrics from your application endpoints and services. You can connect monitoring jobs or connected third-party data sources to the corresponding DNS answers to enable automatic updates that can inform traffic steering decisions.
You can use any of the following methods to monitor endpoint health:
- Create a synthetic NS1 Connect monitoring job for basic up/down monitoring. You can create a PING, DNS, HTTP/S, and TCP monitoring job and connect it to the up/down metadata for the corresponding answer to enable automatic updates.
- Integrate with an external monitoring service (data source) and configure data feeds for individual external monitoring jobs. Depending on the type of data collected by the external monitoring service, you can connect these data feeds to a range of metadata fields to enable automatic updates as network conditions change.
- Configure real user monitoring (RUM) data collection as part of Pulsar's advanced traffic steering functionality to ingest high volumes of real-time performance and availability data. This method is available only to customers who have purchased the NS1 Connect RUM-based traffic steering solution (Pulsar).
Refer to the sections below to learn more about each data collection monitoring method and how you can use it to automatically adjust traffic steering behavior as conditions change.
NS1 Connect monitoring jobs
NS1 Connect provides tools to monitor an application endpoint or service periodically to determine if an endpoint is available. An endpoint is considered up if it meets the user-defined conditions after being checked from one or more monitoring regions. You can connect this monitoring job to the corresponding answers via the up/down metadata field to enable automatic updates. If the monitoring job detects the endpoint is down, the answer metadata is updated to reflect the down status. When you use this configuration in conjunction with the Filter Chain (specifically, the Up filter) NS1 Connect will steer traffic away from answers marked as "down," prioritizing other answers specified in the DNS record.
Every NS1 Connect account comes with at least one NS1 Connect monitoring job that you can configure. You can upgrade your plan to increase the number of monitoring jobs that you can create. Refer to Managing NS1 Connect monitoring jobs for details.
External monitoring jobs (integrations)
NS1 Connect supports integrations with several external monitoring services so you can use that data to inform traffic steering decisions. Whereas NS1 Connect's synthetic monitoring tools support basic up/down monitoring, many third-party integrations collect additional data, such as load-related metrics. You can connect data feeds from external monitoring sources directly to answer metadata to enable automatic updates, and then configure a Filter Chain using filters that reference those metrics.
The NS1 Connect platform supports the following third-party monitoring services:
- ThousandEyes
- Datadog
- AWS CloudWatch
- Catchpoint
- AppDynamics
- Pingdom
Alternatively, you can use the custom NS1 Connect API webhook as a data source to connect with another monitoring system that supports sending an API request containing a JSON object with either simple key-value pairs mapping to the supported answer metadata fields and values.
Refer to the specific instructions for configuring one of the third-party monitoring integrations listed above. Then, refer to this topic to connect the third-party data source to an answer via the answer metadata.
RUM-based (Pulsar) data collection
Pulsar is NS1 Connect's advanced traffic steering solution that collects high volumes of real user monitoring (RUM) data collected from active application users, aggregates this data, and makes it available to use for traffic steering decisions. This enables infrastructure-aware traffic steering across complex, globally distributed networks. You can configure real-time data collection from community (shared) or private resources, such as content delivery networks (CDNs), to track the performance and availability of your application endpoints and services. Similar to the other two other monitoring mechanisms supported by NS1 Connect, you can connect Pulsar monitoring jobs to the Pulsar data metadata field in the corresponding answers to enable automatic updates. Then, you can use any of the Pulsar traffic steering filters in your Filter Chain configuration to use that data when making routing decisions.
Refer to Introduction to Pulsar (RUM-based traffic steering).