Pega Autonomic Event Services 7.3 architecture overview and deployment best practices
Pega Autonomic Event Services™ 7.3 is an application that monitors the performance status of your Pega Platform™ systems. You install it on a stand-alone Pega Platform server. Planning your deployment requires that you are familiar with the application's architecture, best practices that help ensure an efficient deployment, and hardware requirements.
Before making decisions about the server, database, and monitored systems, review the following information:
Architecture overview
The Pega Platform management daemon runs every two minutes and checks current system health, including memory usage, CPU usage, recent response time, requestor count, agent count, and the time of the last system pulse. When you enable integration between a monitored system and Pega Autonomic Event Services, Pega Platform sends a Health Status (HLTH0001) message to Pega Autonomic Event Services via SOAP over HTTP or HTTPS.
Pega Platform includes a ruleset, PegaAESRemote, which supports Pega Autonomic Event Services integration. When you enable integration between a monitored system and Pega Autonomic Event Services, agents in the ruleset periodically gather and push data to the application. This data includes a summary of the standard Pega Platform log usage records, a guardrail compliance report, and schema metadata, primarily index definitions. Additionally, the PegaAESRemote ruleset includes SOAP service rules that provide facilities for Pega Autonomic Event Services to send inquiry and management commands to a monitored node when the optional pull mode features are enabled and manually started.
The following image is a high-level illustration of a typical Pega Autonomic Event Services deployment, showing the relationship between the application and monitored systems.
Pega Autonomic Event Services deployment overview
Alert processing
When a Pega Platform system generates alerts, it writes them to the alert log and sends them by SOAP to Pega Autonomic Event Services, which parses them and stores the records in the pegaam_alert database table. Pega Autonomic Event Services evaluates alert data and triggers critical event scorecard processing for specific codes, such as PEGA0010 Agent Failure. The application parses alert-specific data to determine how to correlate alerts with the same root cause. Every five minutes, an agent aggregates recent alerts based on correlation, and either creates action items for newly observed issues or updates the action items for existing issues. Action work items are stored in table pegaam_action_work.
Exception processing
Exception processing is similar to alert processing. When a Pega Platform system generates exceptions, they are sent by SOAP to Pega Autonomic Event Services, which parses them and stores the records in the pegaam_exception table in the database. Depending on how often an exception occurs, and on the system events that triggered the exceptions, Pega Autonomic Event Services aggregates these records into work objects called exception items. Pega Autonomic Event Services writes these items to the database in the pegaam_exception_work table.
Deployment best practices
To plan your deployment appropriately and ensure optimal performance, consider the following best practices.
Deploy two instances of Pega Autonomic Event Services:
- Production (AESPROD) – Use this instance to monitor production Pega Platform systems.
- Non-production (AESNONPROD) – Use this instance for the following tasks:
- Governance and monitoring of non-production systems
- Development and testing of customizations to Pega Autonomic Event Services
- Testing of upgrades and maintenance of Pega Autonomic Event Services
- Testing of upgrades and maintenance of Pega Platform
- Governance and monitoring of AESPROD
Use a load-balanced cluster with at least two nodes for AESPROD. The load balancer primarily load balances SOAP requests. Configure the device to provide sticky sessions for users.
The following image is a high-level illustration of Pega Autonomic Event Services deployment best practices.
Pega Autonomic Event Services deployment best practices
Hardware requirements
To create an efficient Pega Autonomic Event Services environment for monitoring Pega Platform systems, consider the minimum and optimal hardware requirements.
Minimum recommended system
For optimal performance and reliability, ensure that you use production-grade servers with load balancing and failover for monitoring production deployments. However, like any Pega Platform system, a Pega Autonomic Event Services deployment can grow based on need and resource availability, and you can start using the application on a single server to host services, agents, and the database, which is sufficient to monitor development, testing, and some small production systems. Use at least the following hardware:
- One server to host the database and web application server
- 4 virtual processors (vCPUs)
- 12 GB RAM
- 250 GB disk space
- 100 GB database
- Web application server with 4 GB heap space
Optimal high load and high availability system
Use a high load and high availability configuration for monitoring large numbers of systems and to provide optimal availability and reliability. At least the following hardware is required:
- Dedicated database server host with a 200 GB database
- Two web application server hosts to process messages from monitored systems
- Load balancer to distribute message traffic and users across the web application servers
- One application server to host agent (batch), text indexing, and text search processing
- Run the web/service servers with the Java command argument
-DNodeType=WebUser
. - Run the batch server with the Java command argument
-DNodeType=BackgroundProcessing,Bix,Search
.
- Run the web/service servers with the Java command argument