Cache Channel Service - Health Monitoring Response?

Question

I am wondering what will be the best way to monitor Tridion Cache Channel Service (CCS) for functional health checks.

What we have in place today already?

• Windows Service Monitoring (it is running as windows service)
• Telnet port 1099 check (TCP)

We are able to catch most of the failures with the above two checks, but some times CCS still does not respond for cache invalidation or cache hits and no errors in the logs either(failing silently? not sure).

Are there other ways to do health check?

Typically for http, we can ping a url and get a 200 or 500 etc status codes. Are there any similar techniques for CCS, so we can get the functional health status. It is RMI based, so not sure if it has similar status codes like http.

Any pointers will be appreciated.

Answer 1

I don't think the CCS is able to broadcast a health signal. The only alternative I see is to switch from the CCS to JMS. Apache ActiveMQ, for example, can be monitored extensively, as is described in this post: ActiveMQ JMS ping.

Other advantages of JMS over the CCS:

• It runs on http so it's a bit more 'firewall friendly'
• It can be scaled up using a load balancer
• It can handle any number of 'topics', so you can use one JMS instance for your production / acceptance / dev, live / staging, etc.