Monitoring MarkLogic

This is a quick how-to post for Opsview users who have a need to monitor MarkLogic.

The good news is that MarkLogic have released a Nagios plugin.

The reference manual is available from http://developer.marklogic.com/pubs/5.0/books/monitoring.pdf (see chapter 3 for Nagios specifics) and the plugin itself from http://developer.marklogic.com/download/binaries/nagios/MarkLogic-Nagios-Plugin-1.0-1.tar

Installing the plugin

You’ll only need to follow the first 3 steps of section 3.4 of the Monitoring MarkLogic Guide, in essence:

1. Unzip the plugin tar
2. Copy/move check_marklogic.pl to /usr/local/nagios/libexec
3. chmod +x check_marklogic.pl

Setting up a service check

Once the plugin has been installed we can define service checks, Figure 1 shows two simple examples (using a clean install of MarkLogic plus the Hadoop Connector – maybe a topic for another blog post?).

Figure 1 – Simple MarkLogic check definitions

You would normally want to set up finer-grained service checks with thresholds – consequently the plugin accepts additional arguments (but doesn’t support the de facto help argument) to specify keys (-k), warning (-w) and critical (-c) thresholds. Note that the thresholds can use an operator (-op) argument. These arguments are fully detailed in section 3.5.2.3 of the Monitoring MarkLogic Guide.

Checks in action

Figure 2 shows the host-level view of the service checks, with the detail of the performance data behind them shown in Figures 3 and 4.

Figure 2 – MarkLogic service check summaries

Figure 3 – Document count service check detailed results

Figure 4 – Status service check detailed results

There you go, quick and easy basic monitoring of MarkLogic.