High availability

Plixer Scrutinizer distributed clusters support high availability (HA) configurations that include secondary Reporters and/or backup Collectors for redundancy.

Note

Contact Plixer Technical Support to learn more about HA licensing options.

Secondary Reporters

In distributed deployments, a remote Collector can be registered as a secondary Reporter, which can be used to access the system if the primary Reporter becomes unavailable.

To register a remote Collector as a secondary Reporter, enter the following scrut_util command from the primary Reporter.

SCRUTINIZER> set registercollector [collector_appliance_ip] secondary

After a Collector has been registered as a secondary Reporter, its IP address can be used to access a read-only version of the Plixer Scrutinizer web interface at any time. An updated backup of the primary Reporter’s configuration metadata will also be maintained on that Collector.

If the primary Reporter has become permanently unavailable, the secondary Reporter should be promoted using the set selfreporter scrut_util command, as outlined in the distributed environment setup guide. This will lift the read-only status and restore full web interface functionality.

Note

When promoting a secondary Reporter to primary status, a new license key is required to complete the process.

Backup Collectors

Distributed clusters can be configured to use backup Collectors to enable high availability for flow collection functions.

To use a remote Collector Y as a backup for remote Collector A

  1. Configure all Exporters sending flows to A to also send flows to Y.

  2. In the web interface, navigate to Admin > Resources > Manage Exporters and verify that the selected Exporters are correctly sending flows to both Collectors.

  3. From the Manage Exporters view, set the status of the duplicated Exporters sending flows to Y to Backup.

If remote Collector A becomes unavailable, the Exporters that were previously set to Backup on remote Collector Y must be set to Enabled to allow for continuous flow collection and reporting. Once A is online again, the status of the Exporters should be reverted to Backup.

Hint

When managing a large number of Exporters, filter the list to view only relevant Exporters and use the checkboxes to set them to Backup or Enabled as a bulk action.

HA with Plixer Replicator

Plixer Replicator can simplify the process of setting up backup Collectors by replicating flows data and forwarding it to multiple destination Collectors.

View the Plixer Replicator online documentation or contact Plixer Technical Support to learn more.