Originally posted by: Balaji-OHIO

The monitoring tools what we have not able to see historical information about the process name or pid number for the process that consumed high CPU or memory or paging space. Can you please suggest some of the best monitoring tools available in the market that monitors AIX and other Unix servers?

Originally posted by: luverofpeanuts

nmon recording is the most well rounded of the monitoring tools I've used.   Have you used the -I -t and -T parameters of nmon?

The downfall of almost any of the monitoring tools is that if short lived processes come and go between collection intervals, they may not be represented in the collected output.  Aside from those, nmon recording does a decent job for me.   I've attached a snippet from the NMONVisualizer java GUI tool that reads in nmon recording.  Each of the listed items has a graph provided to characterize the resource usage.  

Linux is another story.   The nmon version in Linux is great, and useful.  However, the underlying performance collection infrastructure on Linux (even Linux on Power), is not quite as mature as the that on AIX.  It is what you have to work with though; you just have to be a tad careful about comparing AIX performance stats to Linux performance stats on the same hardware.   You can make some general observations, but trying to reconcile performance between the two at the OS level can be hard. 

Originally posted by: Balaji-OHIO

Thanks.

Can you please attach a screenshot how the nmon GUI tool looks?

Originally posted by: luverofpeanuts

Here is a link to NMONVisualizer, a graphical nmon analysis tool.  

http://nmonvisualizer.github.io/nmonvisualizer/

http://nmonvisualizer.github.io/nmonvisualizer/screenshots.html

Keep in mind, it operates on the files that nmon creates when nmon is used in 'record' mode.  It is not a "Live" graphical/visualizer.   

If things are happening on a system, I'll normally just copy the current nmon recording file to my laptop, and bring it up in NMONVisualizer.   As the day progresses, I just copy the nmon file again at regular intervals to update the things I'm looking at in the GUI.   

Originally posted by: AncientAIXer

We use nmon to collect to a daily file, from 00:00 to 23:59.  These files are collected onto a centralized admin server with a web server installed.  Another tool nmon analyser generates a spreadsheet of the data in a nmon file.  We use nmon2web for visualizing through the web server.  You can look at a range of dates and even consolidate multiple server data.  Very useful.

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/wikis/home?lang=en#!/wiki/Power%20Systems/page/nmon2web

Originally posted by: Balaji-OHIO

Is it advisable to run nmon always, I meant to put in record mode? Does it going to affect the performance?

Originally posted by: luverofpeanuts

In my opinion, NMON is fairly low impact as far as system performance goes.  We generally have it running on all systems all the time in record mode at 5 or 10 minute intervals and keep 7 days of the detailed nmon output files.  When investigating an issue, I'll run an additional collection at 3 minute intervals. 

Originally posted by: Balaji-OHIO

Also please provide link to download nmon visualizer?

Originally posted by: luverofpeanuts

The link I provide above is the home of NMONVisualizer.  You can download directly from that location.   Just look for the "Download" link.

Originally posted by: Balaji-OHIO

Thanks for introducing this tool :)

I see it's available in open source and built by IBM. Does it involve any cost to use this tool?

Originally posted by: luverofpeanuts

No, as far as I know there is no cost.  I haven't spent anything on it ;-)     Since it is open source, there isn't really a warranty either. 

I tend to use NMONVisualizer first, before the NMONAnalyzer excel spreadsheet.  I like the way I can consolidate reports from multiple systems and focus on intervals in it easier than the Excel reports.  I do keep the NMONAnalyzer handy and use that from time to time to 'double check' how things are looking.

Enjoy! 

Originally posted by: Balaji-OHIO

Thank you Sir for the valuable info.

Originally posted by: Pave1

You might even consider LPAR2RRD, it does what you require, CPU monitoring agentless, the rest metrics via its OS agent or from NMON files. Also free, open source.

http://demo.lpar2rrd.com