Configuring health management

Health management is the process by which the dynamic operations of WebSphere® Virtual Enterprise monitor and manage servers that might fail, to preserve an optimal server environment.

Before you begin

Create the environment that you want to monitor. When you create a health policy, you select members for the policy, so these members must exist before you create the policy.

About this task

Health management is the ability of the system to take a policy-driven approach to monitoring the application server environment and to take action when certain criteria are discovered.

Procedure

  1. Verify that the health controller is enabled.

    The health controller is the autonomic manager that monitors health conditions. The health controller is enabled by default and is required for health management.

    In the administrative console, click Operational policies > Autonomic managers > Health controller. Verify that the health controller is enabled and configure the other settings for the health controller. For more information about configuring the health controller, see Enabling and disabling health management.
  2. Define health policy custom actions. By default, you can define the following actions to occur when a health condition breaches: restart the server, take thread dumps, take heap dumps, or place the server into or out of maintenance mode. If you need a health action that is not covered by these default health actions, create a custom action. You can then select the custom action when you create a health policy. For more information about creating health policy custom actions, see Creating health policy custom actions.
  3. [For z/OS operating system] If you are configuring thread dumps as your health policy action on a z/OS® system, you must specify the _CEE_DMPTARG custom property on your servers. Set the _CEE_DMPTARG custom property on your server and set the value to the location to which you want the thread dumps to be saved. See Health controller custom properties for more information.
  4. Create health policies. Health policies consist of health conditions and health actions. When a health condition is triggered, the health action for the policy is invoked. You can create multiple health policies for a server or set of servers. For more information about creating health policies, see Creating health policies.

Results

The health controller monitors the conditions that you defined for the health policy members, and takes the defined actions on the members when the conditions in the health policy breach.

What to do next

If you chose the Supervise reaction mode, you receive recommendations to improve your health conditions. These recommendations display as runtime tasks that you can accept, deny, or close. To manage runtime tasks, click System administration > Task Management > Runtime Tasks in the administrative console. If you chose the automatic reaction mode, actions to improve the health of your environment occur automatically.

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