Specifying a Test for a Remote Server

Important: The suggestions for Failover and Load Balancing given in this and subsequent sections are intended for development systems only. The source testing functionality described is designed for testing purposes only, and has not been developed to handle the volume of requests required by a production system.

In production systems, Load Balancing should be achieved by using a dedicated load balancer configured by your network administrator.

Next, you must associate a test with this source to provide a way for the Watson™ Explorer Engine application to determine if the search collection (and index) associated with the source is available. To do this, select the Testing tab to display the list of built-in tests that are provided with the Watson Explorer Engine.

Scroll down in the Add source test list and select the test named vse-heartbeat. Click Add to associate this test with the source that you are creating. This displays the form shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Setting Heartbeat Test Parameters

You can set the following values for a VSE heartbeat test:

  • n-history - the number of test results to save and use when subsequently displaying status information.
  • n-docs - the minimum number of documents that must be present in the associated source collection in order for the test to succeed.
  • Request timeout - the number of milliseconds to wait before timing out if the collection associated with this source cannot be contacted.
  • project - the name of the Watson Explorer Engine project with which this source is associated. The default value is query-meta, which is the name of the default Watson Explorer Engine project.

The only one of these values that most people want to change is the Request timeout value, which you may want to increase or decrease depending on your expectations of network performance and the responsiveness of the system on which the remote collection is physically located.

Once you have set any values for which you want to over-ride the defaults, click OK to save your changes and return to the source form that you are creating.

This completes the definition of a source for one of the servers for one of the remote clients of an index for a search collection. You will need to repeat the process beginning in Creating Sources for Distributed Index Testing for each of the servers associated with your distributed index. As you create each of these sources, you should test that source to verify that it is working correctly, as explained in Testing Each Source. You do not need to create a test source for your local collection, because that collection is hosted on the same machine that would be running the tests.

Once these are all defined, proceed to Testing Each Source to test the sources that you have created and verify that they are working correctly.