Introduction to Agent Health Monitoring

Agent Health Monitoring is a feature within Rackspace Monitoring that helps you check your monitgoring agents' performance and ensure that they are working as expected.

You can use Agent Health Monitoring to monitor the states of all your Rackspace monitoring agents on your servers by using checks, alarms, and notification plans, all of which are familiar concepts of monitoring. As a result, you can quickly alert the appropriate person or team when any agent has an issue.

For more information, see the Working with alarms, Working with checks, and Working with Rackspace Intelligence notification plans articles.

How does agent health monitoring work?

When an agent first connects to the Rackspace monitoring server, the server creates an agent.health check and alarm. The check and alarm are associated with the server to which the agent is attached. Each time the agent sends a heartbeat to the monitoring server, the monitoring server produces a metric that includes the heartbeat event's timestamp.

Periodically, the monitoring server triggers event processing on the agent.health alarm. The criteria that you set for the alarm evaluate the timestamp that the server created. If the time stamp is older than five minutes, the alarm changes to a Critical state and triggers the alert.

The agent.health check and alarm work just like any other check and alarm. You can configure the alarm to send alerts to the appropriate teams or individuals by modifying the default notification plan. You can also use the suppression feature on the agent.health check and alarm, or disable the alarm if you don't want to receive any alerts.

When you delete the monitoring entity, such as a Cloud Server, all the checks on that entity are deleted. The deletion of entities is handled automatically when you integrate Rackspace monitoring with other products, such as Cloud Servers.

Respond to an alert

Alerts occur when the monitoring server stops receiving the heartbeat metrics periodically submitted by the agent. To investigate the cause of an alert, perform the following troubleshooting procedures:

1. Connect to the server to verify that the server is up and running.

2. After you successfully connect to the server, verify whether the server can connect to one of the monitoring agent endpoints. The SRV records of the endpoints are as follows:

   • _monitoringagent._tcp.ord1.prod.monitoring.api.rackspacecloud.com
   • _monitoringagent._tcp.dfw1.prod.monitoring.api.rackspacecloud.com
   • _monitoringagent._tcp.lon3.prod.monitoring.api.rackspacecloud.com

3. After you confirm that your server and the connection work, verify whether the agent has stopped running or is experiencing issues. For information about debugging the agent, see Troubleshooting the Rackspace Monitoring Agent.

For a summary of the concepts mentioned in this article, read the Getting Started with Rackspace Intelligence article.

Start using agent health monitoring

The Agent Health Monitoring feature is initially offered at Limited Availability (LA). If you are interested in using this feature, submit a support ticket to express your interest for this feature. The Rackspace Monitoring team will contact you with detailed information.

The agent.health check and alarm are created automatically on all the connected agents when the feature releases. The notification plan that is configured for this alarm varies based on your service level and the monitored product.