External monitoring
While the PingDirectory server provides extensive access to monitoring information to clients or in files on the server filesystem, there is a lot of benefit to using an external mechanism for monitoring individual servers and especially for aggregating information across multiple servers.
| Support for SNMP has been deprecated and will be removed in a future release. |
StatsD endpoints
The PingDirectory server offers support for StatsD endpoints that can send metrics to third-party monitoring software using a simple, well-defined protocol. Many popular monitoring products (like Splunk and DataDog) provide support for ingesting metrics using the StatsD protocol.
The PingDirectory server supports communicating with StatsD servers over TCP or UDP. It optionally supports TLS encryption when using TCP-based communication.
JMX
Java Management Extensions (JMX) is a core java framework that provides support for publishing metrics and notifications. JMX is supported by a wide range of monitoring software, and the jconsole tool that is provided as part of Java installations can also be used to interact with JMX-enabled services.
The PingDirectory server provides support for publishing all monitor information as JMX MBeans. It also provides support for a JMX alert handler that can generate a JMX notification in response to administrative alerts that are raised within the server. The jmx-read privilege is required for access to monitoring data, and the jmx-notify privilege is required to be able to subscribe to JMX notifications.
SNMP
SNMP is another standard protocol that is widely supported by monitoring software. The PingDirectory server can act as an SNMP subagent to make selected monitoring information available for consumption by SNMP clients and monitoring software. The server can also generate SNMP traps in response to administrative alerts that are raised within the server.