Tracking startup/shutdown time of appliances

[digerata]

The startup and shutdown times of our applications get quite long as the complexity and number of appliances with the app grows. I have seen > 10 minutes in several cases. It would be nice to be able to see the amount of time it took the application to start, along with individual times for each component/appliance. (possibly for each stage of startup as well...)

While I haven't been able to test the failover of an appliance, I do get the impression that the faster an app starts and stops, the less downtime we would have in the event of a failure.

So I would use this feature to make sure that any changes to an appliance don't significantly impact startup and possibly shutdown. Additionally, we could benchmark startup/shutdown and then improve upon those times.

-Mike

[PeterNic]

Mike,

Great ideas, I'll post them to engineering.

I see two things:
- displaying the time it took to start/stop each appliance (during progress on start/stop)
- displaying to total time it took to start/stop the application (like on app migrate)

Is this what you were looking for?

Regards,
-- Peter

[digerata]

Exactly! :)

[Dmitry@Rivermine]

Would it be possible to capture the log of the startup of each appliance somewhere - basically if you boot up a server you can watch it go. However, with the virtual appliances we can't.

I noticed that sometimes the start up takes longer than normal because networking has not been setup for an appliance and some of the processes like "sendmail" are trying to send DNS queries which obviously timeout. It's that timeout that's adding to the startup time of the app.

[PeterNic]

Dmitry, in AppLogic 2.4, we are adding the boot console capability - so you can essentially use ssh to watch the boot console of the appliance; the ssh is arranged through the controller, so you have access to it even if the appliance doesn't have network connectivity at all.

It also allows seeing problems - like the one you mentioned with misconfigured sendmail - or with running long fscheck (another reason appliances may take a long time to start).

Best regards,
-- Peter