Aem Monitoring Alerting

AEM Monitoring & Alerting

Purpose

Implement comprehensive monitoring, health checks, alerting, and observability for AEM instances covering system metrics, application performance, content operations, and user experience indicators.

When to Use (Triggers)

• User mentions "monitoring," "health check," "alerting," or "observability"
• References to Sling Health Checks, JMX MBeans, or AEM operations dashboard
• Questions about system metrics, performance baselines, or SLA compliance
• Requests involving log aggregation, APM integration, or incident response
• Discussion of AEM Cloud Service monitoring or Adobe Cloud Manager

Core Capabilities

• Configure Sling Health Checks for custom application and content validation
• Set up JMX MBean monitoring for repository, replication, and workflow metrics
• Integrate with external APM tools (New Relic, Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk)
• Design alerting rules with severity levels and escalation paths
• Implement custom dashboards for content operations visibility

Domain Knowledge Required

Technical Foundation

• Sling Health Check framework (tags, composite checks, cron-scheduled execution)
• JMX MBean architecture and available AEM/Oak MBeans
• Log4j/SLF4J logging configuration and log levels in AEM
• OpenTelemetry / distributed tracing concepts

AEM-Specific Context

• AEM Operations Dashboard and Health Reports console
• Cloud Manager monitoring and alerting (Cloud Service)
• Replication queue depth and agent status monitoring
• Oak repository statistics (session count, observation queue, index lag)
• Dispatcher health and cache hit ratio metrics

Implementation Approach

Step 1: Monitoring Strategy Definition

Define what to monitor based on SLAs and business requirements.

• Identify critical user journeys and their SLIs (Service Level Indicators)
• Define SLOs (Service Level Objectives) for response time, availability, error rate
• Map infrastructure dependencies (author, publish, dispatcher, CDN)
• Determine alerting thresholds and severity levels

Step 2: Health Check Implementation

Build custom health checks for application-specific validation.

• Create Sling Health Check OSGi components with @HealthCheck annotation
• Define check tags for grouping (content, performance, security, integration)
• Implement composite health checks for aggregate status
• Configure MBean-based health checks for system metrics

Step 3: Metric Collection

Set up metric gathering from all AEM layers.

• Configure JMX metric exporters for repository/workflow/replication stats
• Enable request logging and response time tracking
• Set up Sling metrics (timer, counter, histogram) for custom code
• Configure log-based metric extraction for error rates

Step 4: Alerting Configuration

Build alerting rules with proper thresholds and routing.

• Define critical alerts (immediate page: system down, replication failure)
• Define warning alerts (Slack notification: queue depth high, slow queries)
• Configure alert suppression during maintenance windows
• Set up escalation paths for unacknowledged alerts

Step 5: Dashboard & Visualization

Create operational dashboards for different audiences.

• Build technical dashboards (JVM, Oak, query performance, replication)
• Create content operations dashboards (publish rates, workflow completion)
• Design executive dashboards (availability, SLA compliance, content velocity)
• Implement anomaly detection for traffic and error patterns

Quality Checklist

• Health checks cover all critical system components
• Alerting thresholds validated against actual baselines
• No alert fatigue — every alert requires action
• Dashboard loading time under 5 seconds
• Monitoring covers author, publish, and dispatcher tiers
• Log aggregation captures all instances with proper correlation
• Incident runbooks linked to each alert type
• Monitoring itself is monitored (meta-monitoring)

Related Skills

• aem-performance-tuning-profiling (performance baselines)
• aem-debugging-log-analysis (log-based troubleshooting)
• aem-backup-disaster-recovery (recovery monitoring)

Example Use Cases

1. Enterprise SLA Dashboard: Build monitoring covering 99.9% availability SLA with automated incident creation, replication queue alerts, and monthly SLA compliance reporting.
2. Content Publishing Pipeline Monitor: Track end-to-end content publishing from author save to CDN availability, alerting on replication delays exceeding 30 seconds and dispatcher cache invalidation failures.
3. Cloud Service Health Automation: Implement Cloud Manager-compatible health checks that validate content integrity, integration endpoint availability, and custom application logic after each deployment.

Notes

• AEM Cloud Service has built-in monitoring via Cloud Manager — extend rather than replace
• Sling Health Checks should be lightweight — avoid expensive queries in health check execution
• JMX MBeans are not available on publish in Cloud Service — use alternative metric collection
• Alert on symptoms (user impact) rather than causes (CPU usage) when possible