20.7.2.1 Probes and Statistics

The monitoring mechanism works by having each member deploying a set of probes to collect information about its work queues and throughput. It then propagates that information to the group periodically to share that data with the other members.

Such probes are scattered throughout the plugin stack and allow one to establish metrics, such as:

• the certifier queue size;

• the replication applier queue size;

• the total number of transactions certified;

• the total number of remote transactions applied in the member;

• the total number of local transactions.

Once a member receives a message with statistics from another member, it calculates additional metrics regarding how many transactions were certified, applied and locally executed in the last monitoring period.

Monitoring data is shared with others in the group periodically. The monitoring period must be high enough to allow the other members to decide on the current write requests, but low enough that it has minimal impact on group bandwidth. The information is shared every second, and this period is sufficient to address both concerns.