Hey, what's up? In this video, we're going to inspect
the System Overview dashboard introduced in AEM 6.4.
So first to navigate to the dashboard from the start
menu, click: tools, operations, System Overview.
Now in previous versions of AEM Administrators needed to look at
several locations in order to get a full picture of the AEM instance.
The System overview aims to solve this by
providing a high level overview of the
configuration, hardware and health of the
AEM instance, all from a single dashboard.
So let's inspect some of the different areas shown.
Now, to make the overview little more interesting, we have
purposely misconfigured several items on this AEM instance.
So health checks provide a high level summary
of the various health checks provided by AEM.
Only checks that are in a critical or warning status are displayed.
In this case there is a critical status for system maintenance
and requests performance as well as several warnings.
You can click into it to view the full health check report.
Ideally there should not be any health
checks in a critical or warning state.
Next we can see the status of any Maintenance Tasks.
Tasks that are currently running have
succeeded or failed are displayed.
From this status, we can see that
several tasks have failed to execute.
We can click into it to see the maintenance
dashboard and from here we can click into
either the daily or weekly maintenance
window to identify which tasks have failed.
No maintenance tasks should result in a failed state.
So if this occurs, it is certainly something worth investigating.
We can also see the status of any replication
agents or sling distribution agents.
Both areas will show when an agent is blocked
as well as any agents that are idle.
The overview also display if any agents are running.
In this case we can see that a distribution agent is
blocked and that to replication agents are blocked.
A blocked status means that content is not being published
correctly and should be rectified as soon as possible.
You can click into either the replication agents or
distribution agents to navigate to their respective consoles.
From the overview screen, we can also see the status of any
workflows that are running have failed or have been cancelled.
Many failed workflows should be investigated.
It should also be noted that the workflow
information is gathered from a query.
So if the query takes longer than 400 milliseconds then
only the workflows found up until that point are displayed.
You can click into the workflow status
to see a full list of workflow failures.
The status of sling job counts are
also displayed in the system overview.
Only jobs with the status of failed,
queued, canceled or active are displayed.
Many features in AEM rely on sling jobs to execute.
So a large number of failed jobs is indicative of a larger problem.
For example replication, sling distribution and
workflow all rely on sling jobs in the background.
So this large number is really a combination of several issues.
Backup information is displayed for any online
backups that have been triggered or are in progress.
Indexing information is displayed if indexing
is in progress or query is in progress.
This type of information is only displayed if indexing or query
thread is present in the thread dump driving system overview.
Along with critical health status, several other valuable
pieces of information are displayed on the system overview.
So you can see what version of AEM is running
along with the configured run modes.
You can see the version of Oak along with
the type of Node store that's being used.
In this case the default configuration of
segment Tar and file data store is being used.
But if the instance was configured to use say Mongo or an S3 or
as your data store you would see some high level details here.
Estimated node counts give some high level metrics of the number
of pages, number of assets, number of nodes in the repository.
You can also find system information
indicating the operating system
and version as well as system load, disk space and maximum heap.
So all of this information can be quite valuable especially
if the current instance is experiencing any performance issues.
To make it easier to export this information to say
include in a support ticket or to send to another group.
There's a nice download button. This will
export all of this info as a Json File.
The details are also exposed over a rest endpoint.
So if you want to implement some external
monitoring of AEM health you can use this.
So that concludes this video on the New System Overview
dashboard introduced in AEM 6.4. Thanks.