IBM AIX Monitoring

Creating a new AIX monitor

Using the REST API to add a new AIX monitor: Click here

Follow the steps given below to create a new AIX Unix monitor:

1. Click on Add New Monitor link under New Monitor.
2. Select AIX under Servers category.
3. Specify the Display Name of the AIX server.
4. Enter the Hostname/IP Address of the server on which AIX is running.
5. Enter the Subnet Mask of the network.
6. Select the Mode of Monitoring (Telnet or SSH).
   • If Telnet is selected, provide user name, password, and port number (default is 23) of the server.
   • If SSH, provide the user name, password and port number (default is 22) of the server. You have an option to give Public Key Authentication (User name and Private Key). You can also give a Passphrase if the private key is protected with one.

     Note: To identify the Public/Private key, go to command prompt, type cd.SSH/ then from the list, open the files <id_dsa.pub>/<id_rsa.pub> [Public] or <id_dsa>/<id_rsa>[Private] to get the keys.

7. Enter the credential details like user name and password for authentication, or select the required credentials from the Credential Manager list after enabling the Select from Credential list option.
8. Specify the Port number at which the AIX server is running. Default value is 23.
9. Specify the command prompt value, which is the last character in your command prompt. Default value is $ and possible values are >, #, etc.
   Note: In the server which you are trying to monitor through SSH, the PasswordAuthentication variable should be set as 'yes' for the data collection to happen. To ensure this, access the file /etc/ssh/sshd_config and verify the value of PasswordAuthentication variable. If it is set as 'no', modify it to 'yes'and restart the SSH Daemon using the command /etc/rc.d/sshd restart.
10. Enter the Timeout value in seconds.
11. Specify the Polling interval in minutes.
12. Choose the Monitor Group from the combo box to which you want to associate the Monitor (optional).
13. If you are adding a new monitor from an Admin Server, select a Managed Server.
14. Click Add Monitor(s). This discovers the AIX servers from the network and starts monitoring them.

Monitored Parameters

Go to the Monitors Category View by clicking the Monitors tab. Click on the AIX monitors under the Servers table. Displayed is the bulk configuration view of the AIX monitors distributed into three tabs:

• Availability tab displays the availability history for the past 24 hours or 30 days.
• Performance tab displays the health status and events for the past 24 hours or 30 days.
• List view tab enables you to perform bulk admin configuration.

Click on the individual monitors listed to view detailed AIX server performance metrics. The performance metrics have been categorized into 3 different tabs:

• Overview
• CPU
• Disk

Overview

The Overview tab displays basic monitor information along with the dials for CPU, Memory and Disk utilizations (in percentage). You can click on these dials to view detailed graphs and charts for these attributes. The graphs available are History report, hour of day report, day of week report and heat chart. These graphs can be generated for both real time and historical data.

You can use the Custom Fields option in the 'Monitor Information' section to configure additional fields for the monitor.

CPU

This tab provides the CPU usage statistics of the Linux server. The tab includes two graphs - one that displays the CPU utilization by CPU Cores and another that shows the Breakup of CPU utilization - by CPU cores. You can view additional reports by clicking the graphs present in the Breakup of CPU Utilization - by CPU coressection. These reports include the following graphs for all the CPU cores:

• Break up of CPU Utilization (%) vs Time
• User Time (%) vs Time
• System Time (%) vs Time
• I/O Wait Time (%) vs Time
• Idle Time (%) vs Time
• Steal Time (%) vs Time
• CPU Utilization (%) vs Time
• Interrupts/sec Vs Time

The CPU tab also shows the following performance metrics:

You can also view graphs for these attributes by selecting the necessary CPU core and then choosing the appropriate attribute from the dropdown.

Note: Utilization in CPU cores and CPU Entitlement Utilization attributes will be shown only when the value for Type attribute is shared.

Disk

This tab displays disk usage statistics of the AIX server.

Note: Data collection for Disk I/O statistics and Inode statistics can be enabled from 'Disk I/O Statistics Monitoring' and 'Inode Monitoring' options under Settings → Performance Polling → Servers tab.

Network