Monitoring tasks performed by IBM

The monitoring tasks that are performed by IBM are explained in this section.

IBM performs the following types of monitoring for assessing the health of your production site and its services:

System and infrastructure monitoring

System and infrastructure monitoring checks the health and well-being of the physical server hardware, virtual machine resources, and network. This monitoring includes CPU and operating system memory usage, file system health, network availability and throughput, and more. Infrastructure monitoring and alerting to the IBM operations team are standard services that are provided as part of your IBM Sterling® Order Management System service.
Note: System and Infrastructure monitoring is performed for all environments. However, alerts are raised only for the production environment when the site is live.
The following table identifies some of the system and infrastructure monitoring that is conducted by IBM Sterling Order Management System.
Monitoring level Description
Server disk usage IBM monitors and ensures that the server file systems have disk space availability.
Disk I/O IBM tracks for I/O issues in the operations on the file systems.
Physical memory IBM monitors physical memory usage of the servers.
CPU utilization IBM monitors CPU for spikes and tracks data for performance trends.
Network IBM monitors network connectivity and bandwidth in various ways and at multiple layers, including the synthetic monitoring and internal methods. Includes servers, firewalls, routers, proxy servers, and load balancers.
Load Balancer (HA Proxy) IBM monitors that the application load balancers (HA Proxy) are up and listening. URL monitoring ensures that requests are going to the application servers.

Application monitoring

The platform runs on the server infrastructure and provides the software and services to support the application. The application includes monitoring the application JVM, application server node instances, database logical servers, and application components.

Note: Application monitoring is performed only for pre-production and production environments. However, alerts are raised only for the production environment when the site is live.
The following table identifies some of the application monitoring that is conducted by IBM Sterling Order Management System.
Monitoring level Description
Docker containers IBM monitors Docker containers to ensure that they are up and running always.
Middleware components
  • IBM monitors the WebSphere Liberty nodes.
  • IBM monitors that all agent and integration server JVMs are up and running always.
  • IBM monitors the database server for various performance spikes and abnormalities.
  • IBM monitors WebSphere MQ listener to ensure that it is always up and running. To monitor queue depth, you must open a ticket with IBM Support and provide the name of the queue, the queue depth, the duration, and a list of contact emails to which the notifications can be sent.
  • Web and application servers are clustered for High Availability. High Availability load balancer pair (proxy servers) distributes traffic across clusters and handles failover.

Synthetic monitoring

Note: Synthetic monitoring is performed only for pre-production and production environments. However, alerts are raised only for the production environment when the site is live.
Table 1. Synthetic monitoring conducted by IBM
Monitoring Level Description
Browser to primary console URL IBM checks whether your application can be opened from the browser.
Ping to primary console URL IBM checks whether your server can be pinged.
Notes: You are not alerted for any level of monitoring, except queue depth(if subscribed). However, IBM internally takes appropriate actions to fix the issues when alerts are raised. If your site is unavailable, they are notified. Also, if there is a production outage, support provides an associated root cause analysis.

Performance monitoring

Users with the Developer role can view different dashboards in Self Service to understand how the application is being used and what is the performance of the application. For more information, see Monitoring dashboards.