Source Testing

The cornerstone of capabilities such as failover and load-balancing is the ability to detect when a server is unavailable and be able to react appropriately. Watson™ Explorer Engine makes it easy for you to set up and use this sort of status monitoring by enabling you to associate built-in tests, such as a heartbeat test, with each server for each instance of your index. This is done by creating a source for each server that is associated with any synchronized index, adding a test to that source, and scheduling that test for regular, automatic execution. Source testing also allows you to identify if a collection crawl is broken because of HTML changes on a federated source or if your password to the source has changed or expired.

Information on whether the source testing service is running and which tests were run can be found on the Status sub-tab.

The following items can be configured on the Options tab:

• Source Testing Administrator: The user account designated as a source testing administrator.
• Maximum timeout: The maximum amount of time that each test will run. The default setting is 60,000 milliseconds.
• Debug file limit: When cleaning the debug directory, the maximum number of files to leave. The default setting is 1,000.
• Debug age limit: When cleaning the debug directory, remove all sessions last accessed more than this many seconds ago. The default setting is -1 seconds.