Author: Sunny Sharma.
Co-authors: Rajesh Jeyapaul, Neha Ghongade, Shivangi Mehra, Parth Jindal.
IBM AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive) is a high-performance, highly scalable and reliable enterprise-class UNIX operating system, which is widely used in mission-critical environments such as banking, retail, telecommunications, and healthcare. Monitoring AIX hosts is critical to ensure system health and performance in enterprise environments. Without continuous host monitoring, organizations risk prolonged outages, reduced system performance, and potential service disruptions.
IBM Instana provides real-time observability into AIX systems by continuously collecting and analyzing metrics, traces, events, and logs. With the support for full-stack visibility and AI-driven insights, Instana provides the following capabilities to monitor AIX hosts,
- Early detection of performance bottlenecks
- Efficient capacity planning
- Troubleshooting and incident response
- Resource optimization
- Uptime assurance for critical applications
Use cases for AIX host monitoring
When you monitor AIX hosts with Instana, you gain actionable insights that help you achieve a wide range of operational goals. Some of the use cases are explained in the following list,
- Capacity Planning, detect trends in resource utilization to forecast demand and scale infrastructure efficiently.
- Root Cause Analysis, quickly pinpoints the source of performance issues by correlating AIX host data with application behavior and transaction traces.
- SLA Monitoring, ensure that mission-critical applications consistently meet performance and uptime targets by tracking real-time system health.
- Performance Optimization, identify resource-hungry processes, inefficient memory usage, or I/O bottlenecks, and take targeted action to optimize workloads.
- Infrastructure Modernization, evaluate legacy AIX workloads for modernization by assessing performance patterns, resource usage, and interdependencies.
- Issue Prevention, leverage historical trends and real-time alerts to detect anomalies and resolve issues before they impact users.
- Audit and Compliance, maintain a complete view of system behavior over time to support operational auditing and compliance reporting requirements.
What’s new in Instana for AIX
IBM Instana now supports AIX monitoring with a wide range of new system metrics, which provides deeper visibility into host-level performance. You can use these enhancements to achieve more granular observability across key resource areas of AIX infrastructure.
The following list shows the new enhancements,
- Advanced CPU Metrics, such as context switches, device interrupts, hypervisor time, and stolen idle cycles.
- Expanded Memory Metrics, such as tracking paging activity, swap usage, and memory faults.
- Enhanced System Metrics, such as offering insights into kernel-level operations and system responsiveness.
- Detailed Process Metrics, such as highlighting resource-intensive processes and execution trends.
- Disk Monitoring Enhancements, such as capturing I/O throughput, disk latency, and device-specific activity.
- Volume Groups, for visualizing logical volume group usage and performance.
- Physical Volumes, for monitoring individual physical storage volumes for capacity and activity.
- Logical Volumes, for monitoring individual logical storage volumes for capacity and activity.
- File Systems, for providing detailed metrics on mounted file systems, including usage and errors.
These improvements make Instana an even more powerful tool for managing and optimizing your AIX environments. With real-time dashboards and enriched metric coverage, you can proactively monitor, analyze, and troubleshoot system performance with confidence.
Installing and configuring the Instana agent
- Log in to Instana and select Deploy Agent.
- Select Unix from the tiles to open the agent deployment page and select AIX as the platform architecture.
Then, download the agent archive (.tar.gz).
Note:
- For setups with internet connectivity, use the dynamic agent packaging mode (preferred).
- For air-gapped or restricted environments, download the static agent packaging mode.
- Transfer the agent archive to your AIX machine by using SCP, FTP or a USB flash drive, depending on your setup and network access.
- Extract the archive by running the following command: tar -xzvf <name of the .tar.gz file> .
- In your AIX machine, go to
<home>/instana-agent/etc/instana and open the backend.cfg configuration file.
Verify that the key, port, and endpoint server details are correctly set,
- For SaaS environments, these settings are usually preconfigured in the downloaded agent package.
- For On-Premises environments, you must manually update this file with your backend server details.
See the following image for a sample configuration,
- Go to
<home>/instana-agent/bin and open setenv file.
Before making any changes, check whether JAVA_HOME is already defined in your system’s environment variables.
- If
JAVA_HOME is not set globally, you must define it in the setenv file to make sure that the agent runs with the correct Java runtime.
- If
JAVA_HOME is already set, you don’t need to modify the setenv file. The agent uses the existing environment variables.
See the following image for a sample configuration,
- Start the agent by running the ./start command. You can check the status of the agent by using the ./status command. To stop the agent, use the ./stop command.
Architecture Diagram
Exploring AIX Metric Dashboards in Instana
After you install and configure the AIX agent, you can explore the AIX host dashboard in Instana. The dashboard includes various charts that visualize the following key system metrics,
- CPU Usage: Real-time CPU load and performance.
- Memory Usage: Memory and swap usage trends.
- System Metrics: Kernel-level statistics.
- Disk Activity: I/O throughput and performance.
- Process Statistics: Tracks overall process activity and health, highlighting anomalies like blocked, idle, or zombie processes.
- Volume Groups: Aggregated logical storage units comprising multiple physical volumes.
- Physical Volumes: Details about physical disk devices and their usage.
- Logical Volumes: Details about logical disk devices and their usage.
- File Systems: Utilization, capacity, and health of mounted file systems
- Network Interfaces: Packet and traffic insights
- TCP Activity: Network connections and retransmission rates
- Process Toplist: Top resource-consuming processes
These charts help you pinpoint issues, optimize workloads, and maintain system health by providing a complete view of system behavior, from CPU and memory to underlying disk structures and storage resources.
Conclusion
By using the latest Instana enhancements for AIX monitoring, you can achieve end-to-end visibility for AIX systems with the same ease and automation as other platforms. Instana brings comprehensive, real-time observability to mission-critical AIX environments, reducing risk, increasing uptime, and enabling proactive performance management.
Whether you're monitoring legacy applications or modern workloads on AIX, Instana provides the tools you need to keep your systems running smoothly.
References
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