Managing Instances

Create additional instances if you need to physically separate test data and processes of your various clients for increased data security and reduced influence of independent user groups on each other (for example departments). With the help of clients you can further logically separate the data of one instance within one database.

Managing Instances

Instances and their Silk Central services are managed through a common user interface called Instance Administration, which you can access only on the server where Silk Central is installed, using the URL http://localhost:19100. You cannot access the Instance Administration page from a remote computer. You can perform the following actions on an instance or the individual services:

Click or to stop or start services individually. If you stop or start an instance, all services of the instance are stopped or started, respectively.
Click to delete an instance. Use this option only if you are sure that an instance is not required anymore! This action does not remove the data in the database.
Note: To assign an execution server to a different application server, you need to delete the following file on the computer where the execution server is installed: C:\ProgramData\SilkCentral\AgentBase\ItemObjects.ser.
Click to configure instance settings.

Maintenance Mode

Before you perform instance maintenance during which a Silk Central instance is no longer accessible to users, for example when installing a new hotfix or adjusting the settings of a service, you can notify your Silk Central users that the instance is under maintenance:

On the Instance Administration page, click to open the Settings dialog.
On the Maintenance tab, check the Activate maintenance mode check box.
Enter a notification text that users will see when they try to access Silk Central, for example: Silk Central is currently unavailable as we're performing updates. The system will be back online again shortly.
Click OK.
When you are done with the maintenance and all services are running again, deactivate the maintenance mode to allow your users to access Silk Central again.

JMX Measures

To access information or perform operations through JMX, you need the JMX connection string. Click to open the Settings dialog. On the Servers tab, select the required server and copy the JMX connection string. For additional information, see Configuring JMX Settings.

Creating a New Instance

Click New Instance to create an additional instance. Make sure you give the instance a meaningful name, as this name will be used to identify the instance's services and files, and it is part of the URL that users use to access the instance.

For each additional instance, at least 10 GB of additional disk space are required, and the following initial minimal memory:

Front-end server: 768 MB
Application server: 640 MB
Chart server: 200 MB

Depending on your workload, these values may need to be higher.

For more information on the ideal configuration of Silk Central, contact technical support or your technical account team.