Monitoring and Statistics are available since version 1.1.2.0. This page is not available in the user respective admin menu. You can reach the page while simply going to http://search.yourdomain.local/PRTGMonitoring. As the name indicates, this page was optimized to be used with Paessler PRTG.
Any user could go to the page, there are no restrictions, while the link is kind of hidden of course. The only real restriction is that the user has to be authenticated against the web server with NTLM credentials.
Paessler PRTG and other monitoring solutions
As for now this is only optimized to be used with Paessler PRTG, meaning you could use a simple HTTP Data Advanced sensor to access the page. The content it self is a simple XML formatted output that is PRTG conform. Other monitoring solutions that don’t accept this specific format would need to use some kind of script that reads and adjust the XML content to something that the target solution understands. Of course, you could also contact me and let me know what format you need and we see what can be done about it.
Automatic target validation
The monitoring and statistics page as well does a auto validation of your search targets when the page is accessed. The interval for this is configurable on the application configuration page.
If the interval is passed, the page will cause a validation before the content is shown. Depending on your configuration this can take several seconds. Since it is optimized for PRTG there is an defined channel limit configuration that will cause PRTG to go in to warning or error mode for the sensor. If this is the case, there is additional information shown in the sensor that indicates the issue with the configuration.
Per default the interval is set to every 24 hours. The validation will only automatically executed when the Monitoring and Statistics page is accessed. Having said this, if you do a manual validation on the configuration page, it will influence the interval – only the last validation data is kept.
Monitoring and Statistics values
The following channels are defined:
- Total active keywords
- a counter for the various search keywords in the current sessions
- this information is retrieved from the application memory / RAM
- Total Errors for active users
- this counter only checks for the amount of errors in the current sessions – depending on how many sessions are active this can go up theoretically, do not get worried but the data might be interesting for debugging reasons
- Total Errors in Log for today
- how many errors are in the error log table for today
- this is a counter for entries in the log only – do not get scarred when the log holds errors, this might be normal
- Total named TAGs
- how many named TAGs are configured
- Total search targets
- how many search targets are configured
- Total sessions / results
- the amount of active sessions
- this also indicates the amount of turned back results as a total – while not 100% accurate it is a good indicator
- Total users active
- total amount of active and authenticated users
- Validation age (minutes)
- time since the last validation – the channel limit is pulled from the configuration, in theory the limit should never be reached
- Validation Status
- the status of the validation
- 0 = something went badly wrong
- 1 = OK
- 2 = Warning
- e.g. empty directories etc.
- 3 = Error
- wrong configuration values
- not accessible target file systems
- not accessible Windows Search Index database on target
- the status of the validation
Confidentiality
As for the additional information shown in regards to the keywords, user sessions, etc.. none of this information in saved in any way. This is read directly from the RAM respective in memory objects of the application. The time of a session life time depends on the configuration of your web server. This should be 20 minutes by default. There are various automatic clean up processes that try to eliminate active objects rather pro active in the code. I do not suggest to lower the session timeout configuration in your IIS.