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Monitoring operational metrics

Monitoring operational metrics

As a security officer, auditor, or manager, you can use the IBM Cloud Monitoring service to measure how users and applications interact with Hyper Protect Crypto Services.

IBM Cloud Monitoring records data on the operations that occur inside of IBM Cloud. With this service, you can gain operational visibility into the performance and health of your applications, services, and platforms. You can use the advanced features to monitor and troubleshoot, define alerts based on API response codes, and design custom dashboards.

What metrics are available for Hyper Protect Crypto Services?

You can use Monitoring to track the type of API requests that are made to your Hyper Protect Crypto Services instance as well as the latency of the requests.

The following list contains examples of metrics that can be measured in your Monitoring dashboard:

  • Total requests that are made to your Hyper Protect Crypto Services instance.
  • Successful and failed API requests categorized by API type.
  • API request latency over time.
  • Total API requests categorized by response code.

Before you begin

Enabling Hyper Protect Crypto Services service metrics add new metrics to your Monitoring instance.

Before you provision an instance of Monitoring, consider the following guidance:

  • You need to enable the metrics policy for your Hyper Protect Crypto Services instance in order to retrieve operational metrics.
  • Other IBM Cloud users with administrator or editor permissions can manage the Monitoring service in the IBM Cloud. These users must also have platform permissions to create resources within the resource group where they plan to provision the instance.

Connecting Monitoring with Hyper Protect Crypto Services

Your dashboard show metrics for all Hyper Protect Crypto Services instances that are in the same region as the Monitoring instance with an enabled metrics policy.

Configure a Monitoring instance for metrics

To enable platform metrics in a region, complete the following steps:

  1. Provision an instance of Monitoring in the region of the Hyper Protect Crypto Services instance that contains an enabled metrics policy.
  2. Go to the monitoring dashboard.
  3. Click Configure platform metrics.
  4. Select the region where the Hyper Protect Crypto Services instance is created.
  5. Select the Hyper Protect Crypto Services instance in which you would like to receive metrics.
  6. Click Configure.
  7. Your Hyper Protect Crypto Services instance is now set for platform metrics.

Hyper Protect Crypto Services Metrics Details

You can use the metrics in your Monitoring dashboard to measure the types of requests that are made to your service instance as well as the latency of the requests.

API Hits

The type and number of API requests that are made to your Hyper Protect Crypto Services instance. For example, you can track how many API requests that are made by an authorized user by setting an alert. The alert triggers when your Monitoring instance notices a frequent number of 401 status codes that are returned from your Hyper Protect Crypto Services instance.

Table 1. Describes the API Hits metrics.
Metadata Description
Metric Name ibm_hpcs_api_request_gauge
Metric Type Gauge
Value Type none
Segment By Attributes for Segmentation

Latency

The number of time it takes Hyper Protect Crypto Services to receive an API request and respond to it.

The latency is calculated by getting the average of all requests of the same type that occur within 60 seconds.

Table 2. Describes the Latency metrics.
Metadata Description
Metric Name ibm_hpcs_api_latency_gauge
Metric Type Gauge
Value Type Milliseconds
Segment By Attributes for Segmentation

Attributes for Segmentation

You can filter your metrics by using the following attributes.

Table 3. Describes the attributes use for segmenting metrics.
Attribute Name Description
ibm_resource_type Supported resource type is instance.
ibm_hpcs_response_code Response code for the Hyper Protect Crypto Services service API request.
ibm_scope The account, organization, or space GUID associated with the metric.
ibm_ctype Public, dedicated, or local.
ibm_location Location of the Hyper Protect Crypto Services service instance.
ibm_service_name kms.
ibm_resource Hyper Protect Crypto Services service instance ID.
ibm_hpcs_api Hyper Protect Crypto Services service API name.
ibm_resource_group_name Resource group name associated with the Hyper Protect Crypto Services service instance.
ibm_service_instance_name Hyper Protect Crypto Services service instance name.
ibm_service_instance Hyper Protect Crypto Services service instance ID.

Default Dashboards

You need to configure platform metrics and enable a metrics policy on your service instance in order to view your Hyper Protect Crypto Services operational metrics dashboard.

How to find the Monitoring dashboard for your Hyper Protect Crypto Services service instance by using UI

After you configure your Monitoring instance to receive platform metrics, complete the following steps:

  1. Provision your Hyper Protect Crypto Services instance.

  2. On your Hyper Protect Crypto Services instance page, click Actions > Monitoring. On your first usage, you might see a welcome wizard. To advance to the dashboard selection menu, select Next and then Skip at the bottom of the Choosing an installation method page. Accept the prompts that follow. You can then select Hyper Protect Crypto Services.

    The metrics dashboards are available only after metrics have started to be recorded. This might take a few minutes to initialize.

You are now on the Hyper Protect Crypto Services dashboard, and can start monitoring metrics of the service instance.

How to find the Monitoring dashboard for your Hyper Protect Crypto Services service instance by using observability page

After you configure your Monitoring instance to receive platform metrics, complete the following steps:

  1. Go to the monitoring dashboard and find your Monitoring instance that is configured to receive platform metrics.
  2. In the View Dashboard column, click View Monitoring.
  3. Once you are in the Monitoring platform, click Dashboards on the side menu.
  4. Select IBM under the Dashboard Templates section.
  5. Select Hyper Protect Crypto Services - Overview to view the dashboard for your Hyper Protect Crypto Services instance.

You are able to see any metrics in your Monitoring instance until you enable a metrics policy for your Hyper Protect Crypto Services instance and make API requests to your Hyper Protect Crypto Services instance.

How to scope down your metrics by using Metrics Filter Attributes

You can scope down your metrics by using the following scope filters.

Table 4. Describes the scope filters for Hyper Protect Crypto Services metrics.
Attribute Name Description
ibmResourceGroupName The name of the resource group associated with the Hyper Protect Crypto Services service instance.
ibmScope The account, organization, or space GUID associated with the metric.
ibmServiceInstanceName The service instance associated with the metric.
ibmHpcsApi The Hyper Protect Crypto Services API calls associated with the metric.

Because of Monitoring limitations, you are able to see the values in the filters for up to 6 hours at a time. You can manually type in value into scope variables to use scope filters for given time periods.

Setting Alerts

You can set alerts on your Monitoring dashboard to notify you of certain metrics. To set up alerts, complete the following steps:

  1. Click Alerts on the side menu.
  2. Click Add Alert and select Metric as the alert type.
  3. Select the aggregation and the metric that you would like to be performed on.
  4. Select the scope if applicable.
  5. Set the metric and time requirements for the alert to trigger.
  6. Configure and set up the notification channel and notification interval.
  7. Click CREATE.

For more information about configuring metric alerts, see Metric Alerts.