Monitoring Using MC

Management Console gathers and retains history of important system activities about your MC-managed database cluster, such as performance and resource utilization. You can use MC charts to locate performance bottlenecks on a particular node, to identify potential improvements to Vertica configuration, and as a reference for what actions users have taken on the MC interface.

MC directly queries Data Collector tables on the MC-monitored databases themselves. See Management Console Architecture. For how to set up MC to query an alternative database for monitoring data, see Extended Monitoring.

The following list describes some of the areas you can monitor and troubleshoot through the MC interface:

  • Multiple database cluster states and key performance indicators that report on the cluster's overall health
  • Information on individual cluster nodes specific to resources
  • Database activity in relation to CPU/memory, networking, and disk I/O usage
  • Layout of subclusters, and resource utilization and query workload on subclusters. (Available in Eon mode databases only, where the database includes one default subcluster, and may include additional user-defined subclusters.)
  • Query concurrency and internal/user sessions that report on important events in time
  • Cluster-wide messages
  • Database and agent log entries
  • MC user activity (what users are doing while logged in to MC)
  • Issues related to the MC process
  • Error handling and feedback

About Chart Updates

MC retrieves statistical data from the production database to keep the charts updated. The charts also update dynamically with text, color, and messages that Management Console receives from the agents on the database cluster. This information can help you quickly resolve problems.

Each client session to MC uses a connection from MaxClientSessions, a database configuration parameter. This parameter determines the maximum number of sessions that can run on a single database cluster node. Sometimes multiple MC users, mapped to the same database account, are concurrently monitoring the Overview and Activity pages.

You can increase the value for MaxClientSessions on an MC-monitored database to account for extra sessions. See Managing Sessions for details.