9. Deploying and Managing Storage Nodes

Collecting metrics and generating alerts can be resource-intensive. It results in near-constant write operations on the backend database. That creates a natural threshold for the number of metrics that can be collected (30,000 per minute) before encountering performance degradation.

JBoss ON uses two databases to store its information. One is a central relational database (PostgreSQL or Oracle) which stores all configuration about the JBoss ON servers and agents, all resource inventory data, resource configuration, and other data. The other database is a distributed database (a cluster of storage nodes) which stores all numeric monitoring data — in other words, all collected metrics.

The distributed database can be expanded, with multiple nodes in a cluster. This ability to add additional nodes according to load is a crucial management tool for administrators. Rather than encountering that hardware-driven limit of 30,000 metrics collected per minute, additional nodes can be added to improve performance.

At least one storage node must be created and managed by JBoss ON (which minimizes the metrics storage node management overhead since no external tools are required).

There are several paths of communication to handle metrics data, all working in parallel.

Node cluster communication requires three elements:

The metrics storage provides data availability and integrity by backing up the data in two ways: