Load Balancer monitoring

OCI Load Balancer is a fully managed, highly available service that distributes incoming application traffic across multiple backend servers to ensure fault tolerance and optimal performance. Monitoring your Load Balancer with Site24x7 helps you gain real-time visibility into traffic distribution, backend health, and listener performance. This enables faster issue detection, improved uptime, and better resource optimization.

Overview

Site24x7's integration with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Load Balancer enables you to monitor and gain visibility into the performance, health, and availability of your load balancing infrastructure.

With this integration, you can monitor key metrics, track health statuses, and set up proactive alerts to ensure uninterrupted traffic distribution across your backend resources. This integration also provides you with the following child monitors:

• Backend Set: Tracks the health and performance of the group of backend servers attached to your load balancer. Site24x7 monitors key metrics such as the number of healthy and unhealthy backends, backend response latency, and health check status. This helps ensure that traffic is routed only to healthy instances and allows you to take corrective action when a backend becomes unresponsive.
• Listener: Gain visibility into how your load balancer handles incoming client requests. It monitors listener-specific metrics such as request counts, connection errors, and response latencies. With Site24x7, you can detect anomalies like sudden traffic spikes or increases in failed connections, helping you troubleshoot and maintain reliable client-server communication.

Use cases

• A retail e-commerce company relies on Load Balancer to manage incoming user traffic to its shopping platform, which is hosted across multiple backend servers. During a seasonal sale event, the platform experiences a sudden spike in traffic, and one of the backend servers becomes unresponsive due to resource exhaustion.
  With Site24x7’s Load Balancer monitoring, the operations team receives an immediate alert indicating that a backend in the affected backend set has failed a health check. Simultaneously, listener metrics show an increase in connection errors and latency, signaling a potential impact on user experience. Using these insights, the team quickly isolates the issue, reconfigures traffic distribution to healthy servers, and scales up backend resources to handle the load. Site24x7’s real-time monitoring and alerting prevented prolonged downtime, ensured consistent load distribution, and maintained optimal performance during a critical business period.
• A video streaming platform relies on Load Balancer to manage millions of concurrent viewers during high-traffic live sports events. The primary challenge is ensuring smooth streaming without buffering or downtime, which can occur if backend servers become overloaded due to sudden traffic surges. Site24x7 plays a critical role in maintaining performance by automatically discovering new backend servers as they scale, ensuring traffic is efficiently distributed. It continuously monitors bandwidth usage and throughput to identify and prevent bottlenecks before they impact viewers. Additionally, Site24x7 alerts administrators if a cache hit ratio drops, signaling inefficient content delivery that could degrade the user experience. By leveraging these capabilities, the streaming platform achieves seamless, uninterrupted playback, even during peak demand, ensuring high viewer satisfaction and retention.

Benefits of Site24x7's Load Balancer integration

Integrate your Load Balancer with Site24x7 and leverage the following benefits:

• Monitor incoming and outgoing traffic patterns to optimize resource allocation and detect anomalies. 
• Stay informed about the availability and health of your backend resources and listeners.
• Gain deep visibility into request and response metrics, error counts, and backend health check status.
• Track latency, dropped connections, and backend server response times to fine-tune load balancing policies.
• Receive instant alerts on threshold breaches, enabling quick response to potential problems.

Setup and configuration

• Site24x7 uses cross-tenancy access to monitor your resources using Site24x7's tenancy user. Log in to your Site24x7 account and create a specific policy to allow Site24x7 to view your resources without affecting your security.
• On the Integrate OCI Monitor page, select Load Balancer from the Services to be discovered list.

Policies and permissions

Ensure that the associated OCI policy has the permission:

• read the load-balancer-family 

Polling frequency

Site24x7 queries OCI service-level APIs according to the set polling frequency (from once a minute to once a day) to collect metrics from a Load Balancer monitor.

Supported metrics

Threshold configuration

To configure thresholds for a Load Balancer monitor:

1. Log in to your Site24x7 account and navigate to Admin > Configuration Profiles > Threshold and Availability .
2. Click Add Threshold Profile .
3. Select OCI Load Balancer from the Monitor Type drop-down menu and provide an appropriate name in the Display Name field.
4. The supported metrics are displayed in the Threshold Configuration section. You can set threshold values for all the metrics mentioned above.
5. Click Save .

Licensing

• Each Load Balancer monitor utilizes one basic monitor license .
• Each Backend Set monitor utilizes one basic monitor license.
• The Listener monitor is a free monitor.

Viewing Load Balancer data

To monitor your Load Balancer environment, log in to your Site24x7 account and navigate to Cloud > OCI > Load Balancer.

Monitor data

Related topic

Network Load Balancer monitoring