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-based health checks


In the previous section, we have learned about agent-less health checks. That is, checking the health of our Solr server remotely. Here in this section, we will learn about agent based health checks.

Agent based health is defined as the check which can be performed locally and is advanced in nature compared to the agent-less check.

We can even run checks over Nagios Remote Plugin Executor (NRPE), which might operate at operating system level and could include:

  • Memory unitization

  • Disk utilization

  • CPU load

  • Active Java servlet container process

  • JMX checks such as heap memory, custom MBeans and so on.

  • Exception logs

  • Age of a file

The Solr wiki describes how to configure the JMX support, http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SolrJmx.

We will see in detail a few of the agent based monitoring tools such as Opsview, New Relic, and SPM in the Monitoring tools section, which is the last section of the chapter.