Purpose

Parallels Business Automation (PBA) watchdog is a special PBA service written in Perl that monitors the state of the other PBA services and of ordinary processes in the system. Watchdog's main objectives are to:

  • send notifications about problems that either have already occurred in the system or are about to occur. When a PBA administrator receives a notification, he/she is supposed to take measures to fix or prevent the problem manually based on the notification message.
  • automatically restart the selected set of PBA services if it discovers that PBA CP does not respond (www container).

Supported versions of PBA

Watchdog is supported by the following PBA installations:

  • RHEL6/CentOS6 based.
  • Windows 2008 (64-bit) based.

Indications for installation

Indications for Watchdog installation include frequently recurring problems with PBA stability/availability.

Modules and mechanics

Watchdog is comprised of the following modules:

1) PROCESS ("[Stellart Watchdog] - Process monitor" in a process list). This module exists for the Linux version of PBA only.

This module constantly scans processes over a system. All processes are scanned except for those specified under the PS_EXCLUDE parameter of the wd.conf file. For each process, Watchdog checks whether it exceeds the VS_TRESHOLD and RS_TRESHOLD limits specified in the wd.conf file. If the module discovers that a process exceeds any of the specified limits, it sends corresponding notifications.

2) SERVICE ("[Stellart Watchdog] - Service monitor" in a process list).

This module subscribes within SSM service for the events about restarting and termination of PBA containers. Once it receives any of these events, it sends corresponding notification messages.

3) HTTP ("[Stellart Watchdog] - HTTP monitor" in a process list).

This module performs the following actions on a regular basis:

  • The module issues a request for the PBA resource specified under the CP_PATH parameter (defaults to www/nologin/act/BM/SubscrReasonCode_GetWin/StandardInput/?ReasonID=1) to the address specified under the WWW_URL parameter of the wd.conf file;
  • If the module receives a proper response (without any errors) within 60 seconds, then the module will sleep for 120 seconds. Otherwise, the module will restart services listed under the DUMP_SERVERS parameter of the wd.conf file and send corresponding notification messages.

Installation and upgrade

Installation and upgrade instructions are provided in the article #113595.

Additional information

See the global article #113946 Parallels Automation Maintenance Guide for checking other important settings.

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