Resiliency, Self Monitoring, Data Configuration and Backup

ELM is designed and built for reliability. It includes many features to guarantee resiliency and high-availability. For example:

ELM makes automatic backup copies of its live configuration file. Every ten seconds, a thread runs in the ELM Server process that looks for configuration changes. When configuration changes are made to ELM Server Objects, the configuration data (.DAT) file is changed and saved. On ELM Server service startup, if the .DAT file is successfully loaded, a backup of the current configuration data is created.

The ELM Server component is cluster-aware, enabling you to run an ELM Server in a Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Windows Server 2003 server cluster or Windows Server 2008 cluster.

ELM Service Agents include built-in caching functions, enabling them to continue collecting data, monitoring system health and performance, and executing configured corrective actions. If communication or connectivity between a Service Agent and an ELM Server are interrupted, or if the ELM Server is down, the Service Agent will go into Cache Mode, saving collected data until connectivity is restored.

The ELM Server has built-in database failover protection to minimize data loss when the ELM Server's primary database is unavailable. When the ELM Server detects a lack of connectivity with its primary database, it triggers database failover, which enables the ELM Server to create and use a local database for storing incoming data. When connectivity to the primary database is restored, ELM will import data from the temporary database into the primary database.

ELM Self Monitoring Features

ELM includes a diagnostic utility that captures activity, diagnostic, and debugging information, reducing the amount of time it takes to troubleshoot problems.

 Agent Monitor - Performs heartbeat checks on Service Agents. If the Service Agent does not respond or is slow in responding, actions and notification options can be triggered.

 ELM Server Monitor - Enables Service Agents to perform heartbeat checks on the ELM Server. If the ELM Server does not respond or is slow in responding, actions and notification options can be triggered.

Agent and Server Resource Consumption Monitoring - Service Agents automatically monitor their memory consumption, handle counts, and thread counts and automatically cycle themselves when use of any of these resources is higher than the configured threshold. This resource consumption self-monitoring can be dynamically enabled on the ELM Server by adding documented registry entries on the ELM Server.