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Monitor MarkLogic Server

Balance completeness against performance

Collecting and storing monitoring metrics has a performance cost, so you need to balance completeness of desired performance metrics against their cost. The cost of collecting monitoring metrics can differ. In general, the more resources you monitor, the greater the cost. For example, if you have a lot of hosts, server status is going to be more expensive. If you have a lot of forests, database status is going to be more expensive. In most cases, you will use a subset of the available monitoring metrics. And there may be circumstances in which you temporarily monitor certain metrics and, once the issue have been targeted and resolved, you no longer monitor those metrics.

One balancing technique is to measure system performance on a staging environment under heavy load, then enable your monitoring tool and calculate the overhead. You can reduce overhead by reducing collection frequency, reducing the number of metrics collected, or writing a Management API plugin to produce a custom view that pinpoints the specific metrics of interest. Each response from the underlying Management API includes an elapsed time value to help you calculate the relative cost of each response. For details, see Use the Management API.