WhatsUp Gold Failover Manager
Ensuring High Availability Operation of Your WhatsUp Gold Platform
As a WhatsUp Gold user you place immense trust in the robustness and stability of the product. This is indeed your eyes and ears into the health of monitored infrastructure and applications. If something has stopped working the way it should or if failure is impending, WhatsUp Gold solutions alert you immediately. You can start solving the problem even before affected users or your management start calling you. WhatsUp Gold prides itself in providing a solid foundation for IT management including network, server, application and flow monitoring and management.
That said there are still times when WhatsUp Gold may lose visibility into the infrastructure for reasons beyond its control. For example, your maintenance policies may require some downtime for hardware and software upgrading and patching. Your WhatsUp Gold server can lose connectivity to monitored infrastructure because of network failure in your telecom providers’ infrastructure. And potentially your WhatsUp Gold server itself may encounter performance issues, say, from memory or disk corruption or sluggish operation of the Windows system itself.
In any of the scenarios above, you run the potential risk of losing visibility to your infrastructure, even if for short periods. In many monitoring environments that is not an option as ‘dark periods’ introduce significant operational and compliance risks.
Negotiate Planned or Unplanned Downtime of your WhatsUp Gold Server without Losing Monitoring Visibility
The WhatsUp Gold Failover Manager plug-in is designed to make your network monitoring and management tasks even more resilient for high availability operation. It ensures continuous visibility into the health of the monitored infrastructure when the performance or connectivity of the primary WhatsUp Gold server is impaired. In such cases a secondary ‘failover’ server can be automatically set to take over monitoring tasks. WhatsUp Gold Failover Manager is fully integrated into the Alert Center for appropriate notifications and escalations.
With WhatsUp Gold Failover Manager you can:
- Set up Primary and Secondary WhatsUp Gold servers for manual or automatic failover
- Select specific event occurrences and conditions that can trigger ‘failover’ and ‘failback’
- Ensure monitoring data protection through the support for remote database operation
- Remotely manage the failover process from anywhere on the network
- Report failover actions in the Alert Center for single console operations management
- Virtually eliminate the risk of ‘dark periods’ or monitoring data loss
Key Capabilities include:
Primary and Secondary Server Configuration
WhatsUp Gold Failover Manager enables the configuration of a Primary and Secondary server both running the exact same version of WhatsUp Gold. With Failover Manager in place, WhatsUp Gold continues to collect data and run critical monitoring services during planned or unplanned downtime. Planned downtime would typically involve the Primary server being taken offline for maintenance purposes. Unplanned downtime includes situations where the Primary server encounters a performance problem or loses connectivity to the monitoring database. On such occasions, a Secondary server can be set to automatically take over the performance and active monitoring tasks of the Primary server.
Powerful Options for Failover Configuration
WhatsUp Gold Failover Manager supports multiple ways for ascertaining whether the Primary server is in a situation that requires triggering of failover.
First, the Primary Server monitors all of its component services to check for performance impairment. It can be automatically configured to failover for selected event occurrences like, say, the failure of the collection, discovery, or Alert Center services. In WhatsUpGold v14.2 and later, an additional layer of resiliency is added by providing the capability for automatic restart of a failed service as required. Often this may solve the problem without requiring failover.
Second, the Secondary Server monitors the heartbeat to the Primary server in two ways. It periodically checks if the Primary server is reachable and also monitors database updates to ensure that new data is being added at set intervals. If both of these conditions fail, it automatically takes over the monitoring tasks of the Primary server.
Lastly, the Secondary server can be manually set to become the Primary server – especially during planned downtime instances.
Intelligent Bi-Directional Failover and Failback
WhatsUp Gold Failover Manager supports intelligent bi-directional failover and failback. Once failover is triggered, the Secondary Server takes over the tasks of the Primary server. When the Primary server comes back up, it can be set to automatically ‘failback’ from the Secondary system, which then reverts back to standby mode. If the Primary is not set to automatically take over from the Secondary, it continues as the Secondary until a failover event transfers responsibility to it – providing true bi-directional failover capability. A network administrator can also manually set the Secondary server (that has taken over as Primary) to standby mode giving control back to the original Primary server.
Consolidated Failover Alerting in Alert Center
Each Failover action generates an event message that is reported via the WhatsUp Gold Alert Center. Manual changes in Primary and Secondary server status from “Active” to “Standby” modes generate “Informational” events. Automatic changes based on failure detection by the Primary or the Secondary server and subsequent triggering of failover action generates “Error” events. This enables WhatsUp Gold administrators to have complete visibility into the IT infrastructure and the management system from a single console. Both errors and informational events are also viewable via the Failure Workspace report for customized time intervals.