Monitoring Overview

From within an RTclient, hundreds of pieces of information can be gathered in real time about all parts of a running SmartSockets project:

RTclients — names, extension data, message buffers, message traffic statistics, message types, options, CPU usage, memory usage, node, options, current time, subscribed subjects, and so on

RTservers — names, message buffers, message traffic statistics, connections, options, CPU usage, memory usage, node, options, current time, and so on

Subjects — names, RTclients that are subscribing, and so on

Projects — names

This information can be polled once to provide a one-time snapshot of information or watched to provide asynchronous updates when changes occur. A monitoring request can specify either a specific object or all objects matching a wildcard scope filter. The information is delivered to the requesting program in standard message types, prefixed with T_MT_MON_ (for brevity, the T_MT_ portion is omitted from this point on). The fields of these monitoring message types contain the information the RTclient is interested in.

Monitoring is built into SmartSockets, requiring no user-defined code. Just as RTserver and RTclient are layered on top of the function of connections, monitoring is layered on top of the RTserver and RTclient architecture. There is no monitoring available for peer-to-peer connections or for programs that do not use the SmartSockets API or C++ Class Library.

This chapter describes SmartSockets process monitoring, watching and polling for information, and using the monitoring API, TipcMon*. The focus of this chapter is on RTclients and RTservers using global connections. In rare cases, an RTclient might need to use multiple connections to RTservers, using special multiple connections instead of a single global connection. Monitoring this type of connection requires the use of the TipcSrvMon*API instead of TipcMon*. Although the monitoring tasks and concepts are similar to those described in this chapter, an entirely different set of APIs is used. For more information on this type of monitoring, see the TIBCO SmartSockets API Quick Reference and the TIBCO SmartSockets Application Programming Interface reference.