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HQ Agent Architecture

The Hyperic HQ agent is implemented primarily in Java, with small portions of portable C code in places where Java does not yet reach. It runs on Linux, Windows, Solaris, HP/UX, Mac OS X, and AIX. The agent's implementation is designed to have a compact memory and CPU utilization footprint. Over the last 3 years its performance and security have been scrutinized by some of the most demanding IT environments in the world.

The HQ agent has a modular design, as illustrated below:

Agent Architecture

Agent Core Layer

The agent core is the very small, lightweight "kernel" of the agent. It contains a network listener and a command processor.

Network Listener

The network listener implements the agent network protocol, which is a simplified version of the SOAP protocol, transmitted over SSL. It is responsible for marshalling messages on and off the network.

Command Processor

The command processor loads the individual subsystems and plugins, and delegates incoming requests to the appropriate subsystem.

Agent Subsystems
The agent is divided into the following subsystems:

  • Measurement - oversees local metric collection activity, relays collected data to the HQ server
  • Control - executes control actions
  • Auto-Discovery - runs auto-discovery scans, sends inventory reports to the HQ server
  • Event Tracking - tracks log, configuration, and other sources of event information and reports them back to the server for processing

Plugin Layer

Underneath these subsystems is the plugin layer. When a subsystem (for example monitoring) needs to interact with a particular product (for example to gather a metric or restart a service), the subsystem delegates to the plugin for that product, which performs the actual product-specific work.

All plugins interact with the products they support using standards-based interfaces, such as JMX, SNMP, and JDBC. All communication between plugins and their supported products occurs entirely on the local machine, ensuring that no sensitive information travels over the network.

Other Agent Features

Fault Tolerance

The agent continues to function normally even if the HQ server is temporarily unavailable. For example, any monitoring data gathered will be spooled to disk. When the HQ server is once again visible over the network, the agent will transmit all the spooled data.

The configuration of each agent (which metrics it collects, what its control schedule is, and so on), is stored centrally at the HQ server. If an agent gets deleted from a platform for any reason, then nothing is lost. When the agent is reinstalled, it will download its configuration from the server and resume operations as if nothing had happened. This feature was also designed to facilitate "burn-in" scenarios, where the HQ agent is included in an automated install based on a disk image (also known as a "ghost" image).

Distributed Management

The task of manually installing agents on many machines would be very time consuming without the Hyperic deployer tools. This toolkit makes it easy to deploy agents to hundreds of machines, allowing you to direct the deployment from a single console. The deployer tools are implemented using a platform-independent implementation of the SSH protocol, ensuring that all HQ-related network traffic is secure.

More Information

To see more information on HQ architecture, see the following links:

 

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