Use the System Overview Dashboard

Adobe Experience Manager’s (AEM) System Overview provides a high level view of the configuration, hardware, and health of the AEM instance all from a single dashboard.

Transcript
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. -
  1. The System Overview can be accessed from: AEM Start > Tools > Operations > System Overview

    Directly at <server-host>/libs/granite/operations/content/systemoverview.html

  2. The information from the System Overview can be exported by clicking the Download button. The information is also exposed via the following REST endpoint:

  3. Below is a sample output of the JSON that is exported from the System Overview:

    code language-json
    {
        "Health Checks": {
            "1 Critical": "System Maintenance",
            "3 Warn": "Replication Queue, Log Errors, Sling/Granite Content Access Check"
        },
        "Instance": {
            "Adobe Experience Manager": "6.4.0",
            "Run Modes": "s7connect, crx3, non-composite, author, samplecontent, crx3tar",
            "Instance Up Since": "2018-01-22 10:50:37"
        },
        "Repository": {
            "Apache Jackrabbit Oak": "1.8.0",
            "Node Store": "Segment Tar",
            "Repository Size": "0.26 GB",
            "File Data Store": "crx-quickstart/repository/datastore"
        },
        "Maintenance Tasks": {
            "Failed": "AuditLog Maintenance Task, Project Purge, Workflow Purge",
            "Succeeded": "Data Store Garbage Collection, Lucene Binaries Cleanup, Revision Clean Up, Version Purge, Purge of ad-hoc tasks"
        },
        "System Information": {
            "Mac OS X": "10.12.6",
            "System Load Average": "2.29",
            "Usable Disk Space": "89.44 GB",
            "Maximum Heap": "0.97 GB"
        },
        "Estimated Node Counts": {
            "Total": "232448",
            "Tags": "62",
            "Assets": "267",
            "Authorizables": "210",
            "Pages": "1592"
        },
        "Replication Agents": {
            "Blocked": "publish, publish2",
            "Idle": "offloading_b3deb296-9b28-4f60-8587-c06afa2e632c, offloading_outbox, offloading_reverse_b3deb296-9b28-4f60-8587-c06afa2e632c, publish_reverse, scene7, screens, screens2, test_and_target"
        },
        "Distribution Agents": {
            "Blocked": "publish"
        },
        "Workflows": {
            "Running Workflows": "15",
            "Failed Workflows": "15",
            "Failed Jobs": "150"
        },
        "Sling Jobs": {
            "Failed": "305"
        }
    }
    
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