sorted by: recent | see : popular

Content Tagged with hq + MySQL

Two things today.

First, thanks to Cote, Matt, Javier and others for their kind words. I am tremendously excited to be working with Hyperic. I’ve liked the company for a long time, and I’m even more impressed by the team and the strategy now that I am spending a couple of days a week here. I haven’t abandoned retirement altogether, but I have allowed it to erode a little bit because I like this opportunity so much.

Second, I want to pile on Javier’s post on the availability issues at Amazon over the past several days.

It’s worth pointing out that it had to be a pretty lousy weekend for the people responsible for running Amazon’s infrastructure. If you take a step back, the only reason that the downtime is remarkable is because it’s so rare. Nobody blinks when Twitter goes off-line. When my own favorite retailer since 1997 disappears, you notice it, because it simply never happens. I bet that things settle down quickly and we get back to the fast and reliable storefront that we’ve all come to expect.

Javier and others have touched on a likely cause of the outage: Complexity. As systems get more moving parts, they become harder to monitor and maintain. Many hope that the move to cloud computing will make things better; as you use infrastructure in the cloud, the thinking goes, you’ll be able to rely on the cloud service provider to keep it running.

As the downtime with Amazon’s storefront demonstrates, that’s a false hope. If you rely on computing services anywhere, you need to monitor them, and you need to understand how their availability affects your operations. IT shops are running more applications — JBoss, Tomcat, MySQL, home-grown software to run their businesses, along with the laundry list of proprietary and legacy applications they’ve installed over the years. These interact with one another. Every one of these software programs, and every connection among them, is a new potential source of failure.

We hardly ever abandon old systems and infrastructure. We only add new ones. Increased complexity is an irresistible force of nature, and managing it requires new techniques and new tools.

Back to the Amazon outage specifically: I’ve seen a couple of quotes in the media from people who have said, more or less, “Gee, whatever they changed that messed things up, they should have changed it during off hours.”

The fact of the matter is that there is no longer any such thing as “off hours.” For Amazon certainly, the storefront runs constantly. It may be nighttime in North America, but it’s daylight in Eastern Europe and Asia. More and more businesses — and especially those that deliver services over the Internet — simply never get to shut their computers down for maintenance. Their operations infrastructure has to take that into account.

More software running on more hardware in more places equals more complexity. At the same time, users all over the globe expect instantaneous access to data and services from anyplace, anytime. That combination means that IT professionals are staring at some pretty serious problems. The situation is even worse than it appears, though: For many businesses, as for Amazon, if the computers go down, the money stops flowing.

I’m glad to be at Hyperic because we’re working on the hard problems. Manageability of core infrastructure is the iceberg in front of most businesses, these days.

This past Monday, May 5th, I had the opportunity to speak at Community One on Scaling MySQL.  The presentation was based on several months of work to integrate and tune MySQL in to our fastest supported database.  MySQL is the fourth database I have developed on, and while working with it I have found a bunch of nice features that are simple to use which made HQ run extremely fast.  Unfortunately MySQL has some big issues with their query optimizer that made the work a bit more tedious than it needed to be.

Here are my top 3 keys to tuning MySQL ->

1) Query Tuning
Always run “explain” on your queries.  Make sure they use indexes where applicable and do not table scan where you can help it.
Try to avoid using tmp tables where you can in queries.  If you cannot avoid them make sure the tmp table size is as small as possible.

2) Use of Indexes
Make sure you use your clustered index / primary key wisely.  For a table which is written a lot don’t use too many indexes due to overhead of CRUD operations, and on the flip side for a static table make sure it has plenty of index access points and use covering indexes where applicable.

3) Know the MySQL server options and know how to monitor them to make sure they are not out of control.

innodb_buffer_pool_size
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit
tmp_table_size, max_heap_table_size, and max_tmp_tables
innodb_flush_method

For slow query management, make sure you monitor the tmp table status from “show global status”
Created_tmp_files, Created_tmp_tables and especially Created_tmp_disk_tables

HQ offers a very easy and effective way to facilitate this monitoring.  If these status vars grow too fast make sure to turn on your slow query log and debug the slow queries.  There is usually always something that can be done.

Also, feel free to check out http://support.hyperic.com/confluence/display/DOC/MySQL+DB+Preparation for our recommended options.  It is not a one size fits all, but a good place to start in order to tune the MySQL server options.

HQ running on MySQL exemplifies the potential that the database has to scale any application.  It still has a ways to go in terms of features to compete in all spaces, but every major release it keeps getting better.

Here is a link to my presentation from Community One:

http://download.hyperic.com/documentation/commone-mysql.ppt

Yesterday I had the opportunity to listen to Marten Mickos deliver the opening keynote at the MySQL conference here in Santa Clara. As usual, Marten does an enviable job at delivering a presentation which talks about MySQL’s business, its new relationship with Sun Microsystems, and what this all has to do with Open Source.

I’ve been lucky to hear Marten speak at a number of events, and have found that one of the most consistent themes can be distilled down to this (which we at Hyperic fully subscribe to):

Build a great product, Empower your Users, Build a great business

He also reiterated the importance of the GPL as an essential element to drive empowerment of users. This lets them adopt products and participate while creating an opportunity for businesses to deliver value people are willing to pay for. A virtuous cycle, right? Sun seems to think so also (a billion dollars is not the type of money any company throws around lightly)

Ironically, as I was in the middle of writing this post, Slashdot’s editors let out this gem in a post claiming that MyS^H^H^HSun had “begun to close source MySQL”. Luckily, Marten was able to set the knee-jerk cable-news-inspired Slashdot post straight by again explaining to the readers that MySQL is a business which has been able to build a great free, open, GPL database by creating value they don’t necessarily give away. He’s candid about the fact that they are experimenting trying to arrive at the best business model that balances all the elements of the above equation. Obviously, it’s not easy and someone’s undoubtedly going to get upset with the result. Apparently some people on Slashdot think MySQL’s database is written by monks who are morally opposed to any compensation.

Why is this important? Well, because software doesn’t build itself. Another admirable (if slightly more outspoken) guy named Marc Fleury made a big point of that with JBoss’ “Professional Open Source” business model. Everyone got what they wanted: the community got a great, free, open J2EE app server, and JBoss got paid to hire more people to continue to build it.

Recently there were a few examples of failed companies in the management space which either directly used open source or had some connection to it in their businesses. Many wonder if the failure had something to do with open source, their choice of license, or the business model. Few (if any) looked at the more obvious part: the products offered by those companies. Just because something is free and open source, it doesnt mean people will flock to it. Without that first element of the equation, there’s no adoption and no opportunity to create value people will pay for. The result is a failed business. The formula for creating that value is still being developed and is different for every company. We’ve chosen one which so far has brought us much success, but might not work for others.

Much like MySQL, we’re eager to experiment with different ways in which we can deliver the best products to the largest audiences while delivering financial success for our employees and investors. Over the course of this year, you’ll see us continue to enhance and deliver more features and functionality to our open source platform, while continuing to enhance the value of our various subscription offerings. Also like MySQL, we’re eager to engage our community directly as we experiment and learn how to continue to build the best solution to managing large scale web infrastructure.

The first release of Hyperic HQ 3.2 Beta is now available for download. This exciting new release is designed to provide a more powerful ?single pane of glass? to monitor, diagnose and manage today?s complex, custom, web-based IT environments. In addition, significant infrastructure enhancements to the core Hyperic HQ platform were added to deliver the most scalable and manageable enterprise monitoring software available in open source.

New Diagnostics and Visibility
Today?s IT administrators deal with an increasing burden of disparate technologies, and changing resources to monitor and maintain. Typically, they rely on a variety of utilities and diagnostic tools to ensure and restore availability to their systems. Hyperic HQ 3.2 introduces three new capabilities that provide both new and existing users of HQ a single console to manage all layers of their infrastructure:

• Live Exec Data ? Instantly see your most CPU intensive processes (top), disk usage, network connections and more across your entire cluster of Windows and *nix platforms in a single view!
• Currently Down Resources ? This quick look screen gives users the ability to view all down resources and their length of down time at a glance in one page. The view can be more narrowly filtered by generic or specific resource type, and can also be sorted by resource name, type, exact down time, and length of down time.
• Nagios Import Utility ? This new utility automatically imports Nagios hosts, commands and service object. This utility provides administrators currently using Nagios easy access to all the custom checks and configuration currently supported in their Nagios environment, while extending all the additional benefits and features of the Hyperic HQ platform to these users with the click of a button.
• Improved Nagios Integration ? The Hyperic HQ 3.2 Nagios plugin has been extended significantly to provide Nagios administrators the ability to run Nagios plugins natively and view Nagios Services, Hosts, and Statuses in a way that is identical to the Nagios Service Details interface.

More Scalable, Manageable Infrastructure
Hyperic HQ users run some of the largest website and web applications in the world. Providing monitoring and management capablities at this scale can be a daunting task, but it doesn?t have to be. Hyperic HQ 3.2 introduces powerful infrastructure enhancements to ensure maximum visibility with minimum overhead:

• Scalability Improvements ? Hyperic aims to provide the most scalable systems monitoring and management software available in open source with Hyperic HQ 3.2. Significant investment in powering more concurrent checks, collecting more log data, and increasing the database performance for both queries and data insertion will demonstrate immediate results for large scale enterprises. Significant benchmark testing will be conducted in parallel with this Beta, and results will be shared.
• MySQL Database Support - Full support for MySQL database to be used as backend data store for Hyperic HQ 3.2, leveraging the proliferation of MySQL in the enterprise and existing DBA expertise. The performance of MySQL is expected to be on par with the other backend databases we currently support: Oracle, and Postgres.
• HQ Health Check ? The Hyperic HQ Server now supports self-diagnostics on the performance of the server itself, providing users and Hyperic Support a better way to be assured their monitoring system is always available.
• Global Alert Disable - For scheduled maintenance or planned outages, the HQ administrator can globally disable all alerts on-demand in HQ 3.2, thereby preventing unwanted alerts from being generated during these times.

This release is intended for early preview and community participation in perfecting this release. It is not recommended to replace your current HQ production environments. The GA release of Hyperic HQ 3.2 will be available later this winter and will support a direct upgrade from your current Hyperic HQ 3.x environment. For more information on the Hyperic HQ 3.2 Beta see the release notes. Download today and be sure to participate in our user forums and bug forums.

Expanded Community Rewards Program
To encourage the community even further to participate in improving the quality of both the new Hyperic HQ 3.2 Beta, as well as Hyperic HQ installations in production today, we have extended the Hyperic Community Rewards Program. The program now provides members new points awarded for identifying new bugs, fixing reported bugs and contributing new plugins or HOWTOs for the HQ platform. Various rewards are available to power users who contribute at significant levels.

The built-in HQ database is PostgreSQL. Recently, users have been discovering PostgreSQL has a certain limitation: it will not execute more than 2 billion transactions between vacuums. In rare cases, an HQ built-in database can get into this state.

If this happens, the database will stop accepting connections and HQ, which needs a data store, will obviously cease to operate properly. The immediate symptom will be that users will not be able to log in to HQ and the message displayed on the screen will be The backend datasource is unavailable.

That error is not enough to say for sure that the problem is PostgreSQL avoiding wraparound failure by not accepting connections. A quick look at the hqdb.log can confirm. The telltale log entries look like this:

FATAL: database is not accepting commands to avoid wraparound data loss in database "postgres"
HINT: Stop the postmaster and use a standalone backend to vacuum database "postgres".

Happily, postgres tells you how to solve the problem. It’s not very specific, though so I’ll add some details.

The first thing to do is immediately shut HQ down (including the built-in database). Next, start just the database in single-user mode. Technically, you only really need to run a VACUUM, but since we’re here, we might as well be thorough and run VACUUM FULL ANALYZE.

I’ve created a script to start the built-in HQ database in single-user mode. It’s a slightly modified version of the db-start.sh script that is included in HQ installations. It takes one argument which is the name of the database to start up. The database name to VACUUM is specified in the hqdb.log message (it is “postgres” in the message above). Start the database with the script and you will get dropped into the psql command line. Run the VACUUM and exit. Looks something like this:

$ bin/db-start-single-user-8.1.sh postgres
PostgreSQL stand-alone backend 8.1.2
backend> VACUUM FULL ANALYZE;
VACUUM
backend>

When it’s done, you send an EOF (usually control-D) to exit the shell and shut down the database. At this point, you’re done and you can start HQ normally. Things will work and will usually perform much faster.

For more information on this PostgreSQL, check their documentation on how to avoid running into it to begin with.

It’s a question we all wonder. Who will prove their technology team can crank out the best efforts in the industry? Who will be recognized for thier prowess in this fast-moving industry of open source software? To answer this question, we have devised an extremely competitive gauntlet to decide.

The showdown begins tomorrow at 5:30 Pacific.  At the end of the contest, we will know for certian who will take the title of open source world domination. Strategy, speed and general bravado will be the key ingredients needed to succeed. Trash-talking wins you extra points.

The showdown begins at 5:30 pm at Hyperic Headquarters. Wii-tennis will be the game, and there will be Guitar Hero for those less versed in the skills of tennis. For now, the folks that I know to be competing will be:

• Hyperic - favored winner by far. Javier is the ringleader of this team, supported by fellow Wii Warriors Ryan Morgan, Alex Ma and Scott Feldstein.
• MuleSource - Dave Rosenberg and his crew are representing. Dave is reportedly going to carry a Puerto Rican flag and sport a jumpsuit for the event. I’ll be sure to take pictures! :)
• MarketCetera
• JasperSoft
• MySQL

I have also heard that Zimbra is collecting a team. LoopFuse is hiding in Atlanta. Alfresco caved early. Who else dares to compete? Funambol? XenSource? Vyatta? Be sure to send me your team members names so we can draw up the brackets.

Game on!

Hyperic is happy to announce the first beta of HQ 3.1. Be sure to download the beta and give it a spin. This release will include the following new features:

• Expanded Alert Features
  Introduces the Alert Center for central management of alerts in a flat hierarchy, Alert Resolutions descriptions track how to resolve problems, expanded alert email detail to include indicator metric data and previous alert resolution.
• Performance and Scalability Enhancements
  Dramatically improves out-of-the-box scalability for large deployments.
• MySQL
  MySQL 5.0 and above is now a supported database backend for the Hyperic HQ environment, and the HQ plugin for MySQL has been further enhanced for greater management detail.
• Embedded Contextual Help
  Improved context-sensitive help detail, configurable option to display up-to-date help remotely from support.hyperic.com or locally, and local web pages can be customized and expanded for unique deployment environments.
• Localizable UI
  The entire Hyperic HQ UI and help pages are now customizable for users to alter or translate UI elements. Sharing of translations is encouraged through a new area on HyperFORGE.
• Extended Product Coverage
  The new Hyperic HQ distribution bundles support over 13 new products, including notables such as Zimbra, Informix, and OpenLDAP, now deployed in the HQ Agent by default.

3.1 Beta Resources on Hyperic.com

• New feature descriptions
• Beta product page
• Download page

Beginning today, administrators of Zimbra Collaboration Suite, the leader in open source, next-generation email and collaboration software, now have a fully supported, enterprise-ready solution for managing their complex, mission critical environments with the general availability of Hyperic HQ plugin for Zimbra. The plugin made available by Hyperic, the leader in multi-platform, open source systems management, will allow Zimbra customers to easily monitor and manage the performance of their open source messaging and collaboration suite along with all other layers of their infrastructure.

Hyperic’s software provides unprecedented cross-stack visibility and helps enterprises to pinpoint, correct and prevent problems at every layer ? including hardware, networks, virtualization, middleware and applications. The new Hyperic HQ plugin instantly enables system administrators of Zimbra to take full advantage of Hyperic?s powerful management capabilities, including auto-discovery, monitoring, complex alerting and remediation.

“Email and collaboration are core components of running a business and we know that our customers are focused on providing the highest levels of availability for their messaging solution,? said Scott Dietzen, President and CTO of Zimbra. ?Hyperic HQ’s plug in for Zimbra provides a integrated solution to monitor Zimbra and to enable our customers to achieve a higher level of stability.”

“Hyperic is set on providing the most complete out-of-the-box technology support for the always-on, fast moving online services businesses,” said Doug MacEachern, CTO and co-founder of Hyperic. ?Email and collaboration play a pivotal role for these types of businesses to fluidly work together across geographies, teams, and topics. Now with the extra support from Hyperic HQ, Zimbra users can manage and monitor the overall health of all Zimbra deployments along with the rest of their IT systems infrastructure.?

About the plugin
The new plugin monitors the health and performance of every published performance statistic for Zimbra and its infrastructure components. For a full list of management metrics see the Zimbra wiki. The plugin allows Hyperic HQ to automatically discover the availability of the complete set of Zimbra daemons including: Zimbra Tomcat, Zimbra Logger MySQL, Zimbra MySQL, Zimbra OpenLDAP, Zimbra Cyrus SASL, Zimbra ClamAV, Zimbra Apache Httpd, Zimbra Postfix, Zimbra AMaViS, Zimbra Log Watch, Zimbra Swatch, and Zimbra MTA Config. Hyperic also supports full scale management of MySQL, Apache, Tomcat and OpenLDAP, other technologies used by Zimbra.

In addition to the Zimbra plugin, new OpenLDAP and Vyatta plugins were added to the HyperFORGE. Vyatta issued a press release this morning describing the Vyatta plugin and Hyperic?s partnership with Vyatta. For more information on the Vyatta plugin and relationship see the press release.

Availability
The Hyperic HQ plugin for Zimbra, OpenLDAP and Vyatta are available today and are supported for all current Hyperic 3.0 releases. The plugins, along with all other supported and user contributed plugins, are available on Hyperic’s HyperFORGE.

We just received word from the fine folks at EnterpriseDB they they have certified their database product for use with Hyperic HQ. Previously, we certified only Oracle and PostgreSQL as database backends. This is not to be confused, by the way, with database products we enable our customers to monitor and manage. That list runs the gamut from MySQL and PostgreSQL to Oracle and DB2. One of our core principles has always been to give our customers the choice of what technologies they want to use, and certifying more databases for HQ is another step in that direction.

JBoss, MySQL first to integrate Hyperic technology into their offerings

SAN FRANCISCO - October 30, 2006 - Hyperic Inc., the leader in multi-platform, open-source IT management, today announced a partner program that enables independent software vendors (ISVs) to add enterprise-class, multi-platform IT management capabilities to their products. MySQL and JBoss are among the first companies to join the Hyperic Embedded Management program and distribute the Hyperic HQ management platform as part of their open-source offerings.

The Hyperic Embedded Management program makes it easy for software vendors to enhance their offerings with the addition of enterprise-class management functionality. Hyperic’s management software uses a single interface to obtain system data across virtually any platform. This gives customers the ability to integrate HQ into their existing - and future - mixed-stack environments and discover and fix potential problems before they can impact critical business functions.

Hyperic’s cross-platform SIGAR API enables MySQL Enterprise to obtain low-level operating system information across a variety of different platforms ? through a single interface. This serves as one important data point for monitoring and managing the health of MySQL database servers. MySQL Enterprise then acts as a “Virtual DBA”, giving IT departments the ability to understand and solve potential problems before they impact critical business applications.

“Adding the functionality of Hyperic HQ into open source infrastructure products like MySQL and JBoss gives their customers a more complete, open source solution,” said Javier Soltero, CEO of Hyperic. “They get the additional benefits of Hyperic’s enterprise-class IT management platform, making it easy for users to monitor and manage all IT operations from a single portal.”

Commercial ISVs can begin evaluating the capabilities of Hyperic HQ management platform by downloading the open source HQ at www.hyperic.com/downloads/. The Hyperic program also provides partners with joint sales and marketing opportunities, and more.

In addition to its embedded partners, Hyperic’s partner ecosystem includes XenSource and EnterpriseDB, among others.

Hyperic HQ is the industry’s most comprehensive offering for managing any type of software stack?whether it’s an open source LAMP stack, a closed source stack, or a hybrid. Unlike traditional management solutions, Hyperic HQ monitors virtually all kinds of operating systems, web servers, app servers and database servers, and can be extended to monitor most types of applications?both at a technical and business level.

About Hyperic Inc.
Hyperic (www.hyperic.com), The Open Source IT Management Platform, provides systems administrators with IT management software they don’t have to manage. Hyperic is the only open source IT management solution that provides “mix and match” stack management by discovering, monitoring, analyzing and controlling all open source and commercial enterprise IT assets from a unified Web interface. With the industry’s fastest time-to-deployment, and extensible management, Hyperic’s HQ Management Platform has been adopted by enterprises of all sizes, including Hi5 Networks, Ogilvy & Mather, eHarmony.com, and more. Founded in 2004 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, Hyperic is a private company funded by Benchmark Capital and Accel Partners.

###