monitoring time difference between servers
Article ID: 389944
Updated On:
Products
Issue/Introduction
We would like to know if UIM can monitor the "clock skew" or time differences between the clocks on various servers in the environment.
Environment
DX UIM - Any Version
Resolution
There is currently (as of March 2025) no out-of-the-box probe that can accomplish this.
It might be possible through callbacks and scripting (e.g. UIMAPI or Lua) - for example, to retrieve the output of the "get_info" callback from robots, which would include the current epoch time, and compare this across servers.
There are some drawbacks to this approach, however - for example, you would have to consider the time it takes to run the script as well as the round-trip network time to retrieve the information. There would be some unpredictable overhead caused by network latency and this would be further influenced by whether or not the compared servers are across SSL tunnels (thus adding additional latency) as well as time-zone differences.
A more sensible approach would be to ensure all critical servers are synchronized with NTP and monitor the status of the NTP Service, or use the ntp_response probe to ensure that NTP is working correctly and monitor its status.
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