With health management, the system can take a policy-driven approach to monitoring the application server environment and take action when certain criteria are discovered.
The health management subsystem continuously monitors the state of servers and the work that is performed by the servers in your environment. The health management subsystem consists of two main elements: the health controller and health policies.
The health controller is the autonomic manager that controls the health monitoring and management subsystem, and acts on your health policies to ensure certain conditions exist. The health controller runs on one of the nodes in your environment. You can disable or enable health management using the health controller, while still having multiple health policies defined on the system. You can also apply limits to the frequency that the server restarts or prohibit restarts during certain periods.
Health policies define the health conditions that you want to monitor in your environment and the health actions to take if these conditions are not met.
The health management subsystem functions when WebSphere Extended Deployment is in automatic or supervised operating mode. When the reaction mode on the policy is set to automatic, the health management system takes action when a health policy violation is detected. In supervised mode, the health management system creates a runtime task that proposes one or more reactions. The system administrator can approve or deny the proposed actions.
Health actions define the process to use when a health condition is not met. Depending on the conditions that you define, the actions can vary.
The following list defines the health actions that can be run in your environment:
Health policy targets can be a single server, each of the servers in a cluster or dynamic cluster, or each of the servers in a cell. You can define multiple health policies to monitor the same set of servers.
To view the recommendations that are made by the default health policies and to take actions on these recommendations, click System administration > Task management > Runtime tasks.