AWS DynamoDB Network Test

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast, predictable performance with seamless scalability. However, an unexpected network disruption can affect DynamoDB’s storage servers' ability to communicate with its services, leading to server outages. As AWS DynamoDB is used for many mission-critical operations, these outages can have catastrophic effects on them, causing both business and financial losses. Hence, it is imperative to continuously monitor the server availability and response time of the AWS DynamoDB server. This way, administrators can promptly identify any network disruption or server unavailability and thereby, minimize or avoid any unwanted outcomes.

This test reports the availability and responsiveness of the server and collects statistics pertaining to the traffic into and out of the database server. In the process, this test helps administrators be promptly alerted to any server unavailability beforehand and thereby avoid any mishaps.

Target of the test : An AWS DynamoDB server

Agent deploying the test : A remote agent

Outputs of the test : One set of results for the target AWS DynamoDB server being monitored.

Configurable parameters for the test
Parameter	Description
Test Period	How often should the test be executed.
Host	The IP address of the AWS DynamoDB server that is being monitored.
AWS Region	This test uses AWS SDK to interact with AWS DynamoDB and pull relevant metrics. To enable the test to connect to AWS, you need to configure the test with the name of the region to which all requests for metrics should be routed, by default. Specify the name of this AWS Region in this text box.
AWS Access Key ID, AWS Secret Access Key and Confirm Password	To monitor AWS DynamoDB, the eG agent has to be configured with the access key and secret key of a user with a valid AWS account. For this purpose, we recommend that you create a special user on the AWS cloud, obtain the access and secret keys of this user, and configure this test with these keys. The procedure for this has been detailed in the Obtaining an Access key and Secret key topic. Make sure you reconfirm the access and secret keys you provide here by retyping it in the corresponding Confirm Password text box.
Timeout Seconds	Specify the maximum duration (in seconds) for which the test will wait for a response from the server. The default is 120 seconds.
Detailed Diagnosis	To make diagnosis more efficient and accurate, the eG Enterprise embeds an optional detailed diagnostic capability. With this capability, the eG agents can be configured to run detailed, more elaborate tests as and when specific problems are detected. To enable the detailed diagnosis capability of this test for a particular server, choose the On option. To disable the capability, click on the Off option. The option to selectively enable/disable the detailed diagnosis capability will be available only if the following conditions are fulfilled: The eG manager license should allow the detailed diagnosis capability Both the normal and abnormal frequencies configured for the detailed diagnosis measures should not be 0.

Measurements made by the test
Measurement	Description	Measurement Unit	Interpretation
Server availability	Indicates whether the target server is available or not.	Percent	The availability is 100% when the server does respond to a request and 0% when it is not. Availability problems may be caused by a misconfiguration / malfunctioning of the database server, or if the server has not been started. Besides the above, this measure will report that the server is unavailable even if a connection to the database instance is unavailable, or if a query to the database fails. In this case, you can check the values of the Connection availability and Query processor availability measures to know what is exactly causing the database instance to not respond to requests - is it owing to a connection unavailability? or is it due to a query failure? The detailed diagnosis of this measure shows the exact error message received while connecting to database in Details of connection availability field.
Total response time	Indicates the time taken by the database to respond to a user query. This includes both connection time and query execution time.	Seconds	A sudden increase in response time is indicative of a bottleneck with the database server.
Connection availability	Indicates whether the database connection is available or not.	Percent	If this measure reports the value 100 , it indicates that the database connection is available. The value 0 on the other hand indicates that the database connection is unavailable. A connection to the database may be unavailable if the database is down or if the database is listening on a port other than the one configured for it in the eG manager or owing to a poor network link. If the Server availability measure reports the value 0, then, you can check the value of this measure to determine whether/not it is due to the unavailability of a connection to the server.
Connection time to database server	Indicates the time taken to connect to the database server.	Seconds	A high value could indicate a connection bottleneck. Whenever the response time measure soars, you may want to check the value of this measure to determine whether a connection latency is causing the poor responsiveness of the server.
Query processor availability	Indicates whether the query processor is available or not.	Percent	If this measure reports the value 100, it indicates that the processor is available and query executed successfully. The value 0 on the other hand indicates unavailability of the processor and that the query failed. In the event that the Server availability measure reports the value 0, check the value of this measure to figure out whether the failed query is the reason why that measure reported a server unavailability.
Query execution time	Indicates the time taken to execute a database query.	Seconds	A high value could indicate that one/more queries to the server are taking too long to execute. Inefficient/badly designed queries often run for long periods. If the value of this measure is higher than that of the Connection time measure, you can be rest assured that long running queries are the ones causing the responsiveness of the server to suffer.
Records fetched	Indicates the number of records fetched from the database.	Number	The value 0 indicates that no records are fetched from the database.