Your database cluster contains your most business-critical data and therefore proper performance under load is critical to business health. If response time is slow, customers (and staff) get frustrated and the business suffers a slow-down.

If the database layer is unable to keep up with demand, all applications can and will suffer slow performance as a result.

To prevent this situation, use load tests to determine the throughput as objectively as possible.

In the sample load.pl script below, increase load by increasing the thread quantity.

You could also run this on a database with data in it without polluting the existing data since new test databases are created to match each node’s hostname for uniqueness.

Note: The examples in this blog post assume that a Connector is …

In a previous post we went into detail about how to implement Tungsten-specific checks. In this post we will focus on the other standard Nagios checks that would help keep your cluster nodes healthy.

Your database cluster contains your most business-critical data. The slave nodes must be online, healthy and in sync with the master in order to be viable failover candidates.

This means keeping a close watch on the health of the databases nodes from many perspectives, from ensuring sufficient disk space to testing that replication traffic is flowing.

A robust monitoring setup is essential for cluster health and viability – if your replicator goes offline and you do not know about it, then that slave becomes effectively useless because it has stale data.

Nagios Checks The Power of Persistence

One …

Your database cluster contains your most business-critical data. The slave nodes must be online, healthy and in sync with the master in order to be viable failover candidates.

This means keeping a close watch on the health of the databases nodes from many perspectives, from ensuring sufficient disk space to testing that replication traffic is flowing.

A robust monitoring setup is essential for cluster health and viability – if your replicator goes offline and you do not know about it, then that slave becomes effectively useless because it has stale data.

Big Brother is Watching You! The Power of Nagios

Even while you sleep, your servers are busy, and you simply cannot keep watch all the time. Now, more than ever, with global deployments, it is literally impossible to watch everything all the time.

Enter Nagios, you best big brother ever. As a long-time player in the monitoring market, Nagios has both …

Continuent Clustering support true distributed multimaster clustering. In this topology, there are cross-site replicator services for each remote site. In a 3-site configuration, there are a total of 9 replication streams to manage.

Continuent Clustering also offers a graphical administration tool called the Tungsten Dashboard to help with your management burden. The GUI makes the deployment much easier to visualize and administer.

For our example, we will have a Composite Multimaster dataservice called global with three active, writable member clusters (one per site), east, west and north.

Dashboard Summary View

In the summary, collapsed view, the composite service and all member clusters are listed with associated information and controls. Note that the Type for the composite dataservice global is CompMM …