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Sentinel Technical Features
- Light-weight communication
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All communication between remote monitoring agents and the Sentinel server is via a proprietary protocol built on top of UDP. Packets are small and infrequent. This minimizes the impact Sentinel has on the network, even when many machines are monitored.
- Redundancy
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Sentinel can be configured to reside on multiple systems. Sentinel systems negotiate automatically and designate one of the systems as a master system. This system will receive and record all event notifications; the other systems function as hot standbys, maintaining contact with the master system receiving a copy of all event notifications. Should the master system fail or become inaccessible, one of the standby systems will automatically take over. Since the standby systems always maintain an up-to-date copy of the event database, no monitoring information is lost and the standby can take over instantly. This ensures that the failure of a single machine will not cause a loss of monitoring capability.
- Monitoring through a Firewall
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Sentinel can be configured to tunnel messages from one or more remote monitoring agents through a single TCP connection. This allows monitoring across a WAN or firewall, where it might not be permissible or desirable to use the usual UDP protocol.
- Rule-based Configuration
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The behavior of all Sentinel monitoring agents is controlled by configuration rules. Configuration rules are simple to create using Sentinel's graphic rule editor. Custom monitoring agents built using the Sentinel API can also use the same configuration rule language and graphic rule editor.
- Scalability
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Sentinel is built to be scalable. The data representation used in Sentinel was designed to handle events from thousands of sources. Real-time event matching in the front-end display and the back-end processes is done using an efficient pattern matching technique whose performance is unaffected by the number of objects being matched.
- Centralized Configuration
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All Sentinel configuration is kept on a central server. Remote monitoring agents download this configuration to control their behavior. Minimal resources (generally only a single binary file) are required on monitored systems. The configuration repository supports redundant installation; remote monitoring agents will choose any configuration server which is available.
- Remote Upgrade
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Locally installed Sentinel components can be told to remotely upgrade themselves; they will automatically download a new component from the central Sentinel server. This facilitates software upgrades.
- Open API
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The Sentinel API is fully documented and available for customers to create their own custom monitoring agents. The API automatically and seamlessly gives a custom monitoring agent the same rule-based centralized configuration and redundancy capabilities available in the standard Sentinel components. The API allows the Sentinel rule language to be extended to accommodate additional monitoring functionality.
- Security
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Sentinel processes are not able to control any non-Sentinel software components. A properly configured Sentinel system does not create or impose any additional security risks.
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