IBM Tivoli Monitoring > Version 6.3 Fix Pack 2 > Installation Guides > High Availability Guide for Distributed Systems
IBM Tivoli Monitoring, Version 6.3 Fix Pack 2
Configure for high availability and disaster recovery
Among the most important considerations in setting up the Tivoli Monitoring environment is ensuring high availability of the product components and being able to recover quickly from failures.
There are multiple components to consider when discussing high availability. Ensuring high availability involves achieving redundancy for every Monitoring component. Disaster recovery means being able to recover from a major outage such as a data center going offline or losing its WAN link.
- Configure the hub monitoring server for high availability and disaster recovery
The hub monitoring server is a highly reliable component, and many users choose to run with a single hub monitoring server and use backup and restore operations to ensure that they have minimum downtime in case of a hardware failure. Other users require higher availability and less downtime and employ multiple hub monitoring servers to achieve either a high availability (HA) environment, disaster recovery (DR) environment, or a combination (high availability and disaster recovery) environment. The following section describes some of the strategies used to achieve the desired level of availability and downtime.
- Configure for portal server high availability and disaster recovery
It is important to have multiple portal servers available in case of a hardware failure. While the hub monitoring server tracks the state of the Tivoli Monitoring environment it is not as critical to ensure that data is synchronized in real-time between multiple portal servers. The primary data that you want to protect is the customization that is stored in the portal server database, such as user-defined workspaces. Because this data does not change frequently, a good backup and restore strategy ensures a highly available environment.
- Configure for IBM Dashboard Application Services Hub high availability and disaster recovery
IBM Dashboard Application Services Hub Server supports load balancing for high availability.
- Configure for agent and remote monitoring server high availability and disaster recovery
All agents can be defined with a primary and secondary monitoring server, which allows the agent to connect to the secondary monitoring server if the primary is unavailable. Failover to the secondary monitoring server occurs automatically if the agent fails to communicate with the primary monitoring server.
- Configure for warehouse high availability and disaster recovery
When setting up the Warehouse for high availability and disaster recovery, the primary concern is backing up the data.
- Configure for Warehouse Proxy Agent high availability and disaster recovery
You need to achieve redundancy with the Warehouse Proxy Agent. Only one Warehouse Proxy Agent can be receiving historical data from a specific agent. You can encounter problems if two Warehouse Proxy Agents are configured to receive historical data from the same agent. To avoid problems, ensure that only one Warehouse Proxy Agent is responsible for collecting the historical data from a remote monitoring server.
- Configure for Summarization and Pruning Agent high availability and disaster recovery
Connect the Summarization and Pruning Agent to the hub monitoring servers. When the Hot Standby option is used, the Summarization and Pruning Agent must be configured with the standby hub as the secondary monitoring server. However, there are some additional considerations for achieving high availability with the Summarization and Pruning Agent.
- Configure for Tivoli Performance Analyzer high availability and disaster recovery
The Tivoli Performance Analyzer must always connect to the hub monitoring server. When you use the Hot Standby option, you can configure Tivoli Performance Analyzer Agent with the standby hub as the secondary monitoring server.