Monitoring MongoDB

MongoDB is a cross-platform document-oriented database. MongoDB falls into the class of a NoSQL database and eschews the traditional table-based relational database structure in favor of JSON-like documents with dynamic schemas (MongoDB calls the format BSON). Instead of taking a business subject and breaking it up into multiple relational structures, MongoDB can store the business subject in the minimal number of documents. For example, instead of storing title and author information in two distinct relational structures, title, author, and other title-related information can all be stored in a single document called Book. This has the benefit of making the integration of data in certain types of applications easier and faster. Released under the “Server Side Public License”, MongoDB Server is open-source software.

First developed by the software company MongoDB Inc. in October 2007 as a component of a planned platform as a service product, the company shifted to an open-source development model in 2009, with MongoDB offering commercial support and other services. Since then, MongoDB has been adopted as backend software by a number of major websites and services, including Craigslist, eBay, and Foursquare among others. As of July 2015, MongoDB is the fourth most popular type of database management system, and the most popular for document stores.

Business Challenge

MongoDB is built to be highly scalable and deployments regularly scale over a number of servers and across network segments. MongoDB scales horizontally using sharding. The user selects a shard key, which determines how the data in a collection will be distributed. The data is split into ranges (based on the shard key) and distributed across multiple shards. (A shard is a master with one or more slaves.) MongoDB can run over multiple servers, balancing the load and/or duplicating data to keep the system up and running in case of hardware failure. Mongo’s architecture makes it highly scalable and capable of running in environments requiring 24/7 availability. The downside to this complex architecture is that many elements need to be monitored and tuned to ensure optimum performance and availability.

Key Features

Foglight for MongoDB© is designed to provide enterprises with a powerful tool that can act standalone or as part of broader cross-platform database monitoring requirements. To support enterprise performance Foglight for MongoDB© will support the monitoring of key functions including the MongoDB Server, Queries, Indexing, Replication, Load Balancing and File Storage.

As with all Foglight solutions, Foglight for MongoDB© will run as a native Foglight process leveraging the Foglight Agent Manager (FglAM) for communications with the agent. Foglight for MongoDB can be run locally (Agent on the Host) or remotely (Agent on FMS or Proxy Server). The solution will leverage the Foglight Rules Engine providing the ability to evaluate and alert on potential issues before they significantly affect performance and availability.

Additional details will be provided shortly.