Dynamic Entities Health

Introduction Copied

The Dynamic Entities Health plug-in monitors the performance of Collection Agent and Netprobe communication. It tracks the state of all metric received by a probe from the Collection Agent, and all Dynamic Entities associated with a probe. You can perform additional diagnostics with Dynamic Entities commands in Dynamic Entities.

Configuration Copied

This section describes all configuration settings available in the Dynamic Entities Health sampler.

Name Description
Entities > Show all If this setting is enabled, the Entities dataview will show the status of all dynamic entities. Otherwise, the following entities will not be shown:
  • Pending entities
  • Accepted entities that do not have rejected samplers

Mandatory: No

Default: False
Streams > Show all If this setting is enabled, the Streams dataview will show the status of all dynamic streams. Otherwise, streams with no dropped messages will not be shown.

Mandatory: No

Default: False

Dataviews Copied

The plug-in produces three dataviews. These provide you with an overview of the sampling process.

Entities Copied

The Entities section shows the status of dynamic entities created by the Netprobe. The Entities > Show All option determines which dynamic entities are shown in this dataview. If this sampler was generated by Netprobe self-monitoring, the Entities > Show All option is disabled.

Headline legend Copied

Name Description
entityTimeout Specifies the duration for which no metric or log data must be seen before that entity is considered stale and no longer monitored.
staleDataTimeout Specifies the duration for which no data must be seen before an entity is marked as stale.
pendingEntityCount Total number of dynamic entities in pending status awaiting creation.
acceptedEntityCount Total number of dynamic entities in an accepted status following their creation.
rejectedEntityCount Total number of dynamic entities in a rejected status after their creation.

Table legend Copied

Name Description
component Name of a proposed entity.
state The ACCEPTED or REJECTED state of a component.
If the Gateway cannot acquire a license token for a component it is rejected and the state is shown as UNLICENSED.
samplerCount Total number of samplers provided by a component.
rejectedSamplerCount Number of samplers provided by a component that have been rejected.
streamCount Number of streams provided by a component.
unmonitoredStreamCount Number of streams provided by a component but not monitored.

InvalidMetrics Copied

The InvalidMetrics section shows all metrics that are not included in an entity or stream.

Headline legend Copied

Headline legend Copied

Name Description
numberDetected Total number of invalid metrics.

Table legend Copied

Name Description
key Key used to identify the metric. The key is the unique combination of the metric name and the metric's dimensions.
name Name of the metric.
reason

The reason the Gateway has not included the metric. These include:

  • No Mapping — no mapping exists for this metric.
  • Bad Mapping — this metric is used by a mapping that would cause an error. For example, a mapping that may create an entity with a empty name or a name that contains illegal characters.
  • Entity Rejected — this metric is associated with a rejected entity.
  • Sampler Rejected — this metric is associated with a rejected sampler.
  • Cell clash — this metric is associated with a cell that is already in use.
  • Row Dimension clash — this metric cannot be mapped to the row the mapping specifies because the dimensions of the datapoint do not match the dimensions of the other datapoints mapped to that row.
  • Entity Dimension clash — this metric conflicts with the known dimensions of the entity or its attributes.
  • Attribute Clash — this metric conflicts with the known entity attributes.
  • Entity Unlicensed — this metric is associated with an entity that is not licensed.

Entity consistency Copied

When processing an incoming datapoint, the Netprobe attempts to ensure that the attributes of existing entities remain consistent.

In general, the rules for updating attributes based on new datapoints are as follows:

As an example, consider the following sequence of datapoints:

Timestep Mapped metric Entity attributes Attributes from new datapoint Metric status Event
1 metric_1 No entity exists ENV=DEV, LOC=LDN ACCEPTED Entity created with attributes ENV=DEV, LOC=LDN
2 metric_2 ENV=DEV, LOC=LDN ENV=PRD REJECTED Attributes conflict, metric rejected.
3 metric_3 ENV=DEV, LOC=LDN APP=MyAPP ACCEPTED Entity updated to add attribute APP=MyAPP
4 metric_1 ENV=DEV,LOC=LDN,APP=MyAPP ENV=DEV,LOC=NYC ACCEPTED Entity updated to change attribute value from LOC=LDNto LOC=NYC

A full list of all cases is provided below for greater detail. In this table we consider an example entity with one attribute and one metric, and each row indicates an independent case.

Current entity attribute value Current metric attribute value Attribute value from new datapoint Metric status Event
NONE NONE NONE ACCEPTED Entity attribute value unchanged.
NONE ANY Att_C ACCEPTED Entity attribute value updated from NONE to Att_C.
Att_A not Att_A NONE ACCEPTED Entity attribute value unchanged.
Att_A ANY Att_A ACCEPTED Entity attribute value unchanged.
Att_A Att_A NONE ACCEPTED Entity attribute value updated from Att_A to NONE.
Att_A Att_A Att_C ACCEPTED Entity attribute value updated from Att_A to Att_C.
Att_A Att_B Att_A ACCEPTED Entity attribute value unchanged.
Att_A NONE Att_C REJECTED Entity attribute value unchanged.
Att_A Att_B Att_B REJECTED Entity attribute value unchanged.
Att_A Att_B Att_C REJECTED Entity attribute value unchanged.

Streams Copied

The Streams section shows information about dynamic streams.

When a Netprobe receives an event or log type datapoint from a Collection Agent that matches a dynamic mapping, then a dynamic stream is created, or a new message is added to an existing stream.

The Streams > Show All option determines which dynamic streams are shown in this dataview. If this sampler was generated by Netprobe self-monitoring, the Streams > Show All option is disabled.

Note

Information about invalid stream metrics are shown in the Invalid metrics section.

Headline legend Copied

Name Description
numberCreated Total number of streams created by Gateway.
numberWithMessagesLost Total number of messages that have been lost.

Table legend Copied

Name Description
stream Name of the stream.
subscribers Number of samplers, such as FKM or State Tracker, that are subscribed to the stream.
messagesReceived Number of event or log type datapoints that have been posted to the stream.
messagesUnread Number of messages that have been posted to the stream but have not been read by all subscribers.
messagesLost Total number of messages that have been lost.
Stream messages are stored in a buffer. By default, each stream is limited to 1000 messages until they are consumed by another streaming component like the FKM plugin. The buffer limit can be changed in the Collection Agent parameter configuration. For more information, see Collection Agent parameters configuration.
If the buffer limit is being reached, messages will eventually be lost if there are no subscribers, or if a subscriber does not consume messages as fast as they are produced.

InvalidStreams Copied

The InvalidStreams section shows all metrics that are not included in a stream.

Headline legend Copied

Name Description
numberDetected The total number of invalid metrics.

Table legend Copied

Name Description
key Key used to identify the metric. The key is the unique combination of the metric name and the metric's dimensions.
name Name of the metric.
reason

The reason the Gateway has not included the metric. These include:

  • No Mapping — no mapping exists for this metric.
  • Bad Mapping — this metric is used by a mapping that would cause an error. For example, a mapping that may create an entity with a empty name or a name that contains illegal characters.
  • Entity Rejected — this metric is associated with a rejected entity.
  • Sampler Rejected — this metric is associated with a rejected sampler.
  • Entity Dimension clash — this metric conflicts with the known dimensions of the entity or its attributes.
  • Attribute Clash — this metric conflicts with the known entity attributes.
  • Entity Unlicensed — this metric is associated with an entity that is not licensed.
  • Unprocessed Stream — this metric is associated with a stream that is not watched by any FKM or otherwise published.

Signals Copied

The Signals section shows the status of collector self-monitoring signals generated during the sampling process.

Table legend Copied

You can run the Show Signals command on a specific row to review the details of the signals, including any error messages.

Name Description
collector Collector that emitted the signals.
numberOfSignals Total number of signal streams emitted by the collector.
numberWarningSignals

Number of signal streams currently in warning state.
numberErrorSignals Number of signal streams currently in error state.
["Geneos"] ["Geneos > Netprobe"] ["Technical Reference"]

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