Book Image

Administrating Solr

By : Surendra Mohan
Book Image

Administrating Solr

By: Surendra Mohan

Overview of this book

Implementing different search engines on web products is a mandate these days. Apache Solr is a robust search engine, but simply implementing Apache Solr and forgetting about it is not a good idea, especially when you have to fight for the search ranking of your web product. In such a scenario, you need to keep monitoring, administrating, and optimizing your Solr to retain your ranking. "Administrating Solr" is a practical, hands-on guide. This book will provide you with a number of clear, step-by-step exercises and some advanced concepts which will help you administrate, monitor, and optimize Solr using Drupal and associated scripts. Administrating Solr will also provide you with a solid grounding on how you can use Apache Solr with Drupal. "Administrating Solr" starts with an overview of Apache Solr and the installation process to get you familiar with Solr. It then gradually moves on to discuss the mysteries that make Solr flexible enough to render appropriate search results in different scenarios. This book will take you through clear and practical concepts that will help you monitor, administrate, and optimize your Solr appropriately using both scripts and tools. This book will also teach you ways to query your search and methods to keep your Solr healthy and well maintained. With this book, you will learn how to effectively implement and optimize Solr using Drupal.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Agent-less health checks


Before we get into the actual topic, we need to understand what is an agent-less check and later delve into the answer to the question, what should we look for over the network? We define agent-less check as the Solr health check, which can be performed remotely.

The first and the foremost thing we should do is to have a host-level check, which can be expected to perform a network-level ping. Then, we may go for checking TCP connectivity to the servlet container port and then make an HTTP GET request to the Solr front page checking for a known string (for instance, Welcome to Solr Monitoring and Optimization).

Now we can start with performing Solr specific checks by monitoring items which may include:

  • Ping status

  • Number of documents

  • Number and rate (per second) of queries

  • Average response time

  • Number of modifications

  • Cache hit ratio

  • Replication status

  • Synthetic queries

As an example, we will walk-through one of the items from the list (for instance, Ping status).

Ping status...