Are there any comparisons documented between the use of JTOpen vs SNMP when monitoring resources on the IBM iSeries?

Are there limitations for either protocol or benefits that would help make a choice between monitoring solutions?

Thanks for your support!

Regards,
Greg

We had a long running PRM open with IBM support on SNMP functionality;  at the end of that road we basically agreed that the current SNMP measurements are for the Power server itself,  and not the individual LPAR which holds the IP address one is querying.    According to support,  it's "working as expected".    We created a RFE ( https://ibm-power-systems.ideas.ibm.com/ideas/IBMI-I-3530 ) to request that it actually returns information specific to the lpar being queried. 

We're now going down the route of Prometheus and Jesse Gorzinski's open source jdbc exporter ( https://github.com/ThePrez/prometheus-exporter-jdbc ) to capture the data.  Then we'd have our enterprise monitoring system query this secondary location.

Are there any comparisons documented between the use of JTOpen vs SNMP when monitoring resources on the IBM iSeries?

Are there limitations for either protocol or benefits that would help make a choice between monitoring solutions?

Thanks for your support!

Regards,
Greg

Yea... SNMP can get you some thing.. but that is a pretty minimal set of metrics. JTOpen, specially leveraging the JavaTool box native methods, better, as you have more metrics available. But as referenced above, Prometheus is a framework that is leveraging SQL Services and that is the key.  Jesse as put a great list of metrics that are all built on SQL Services to provide a rich set of metrics.   You can plug this data in to other interfaces like Nagios to visualize the metrics. You can also use Nagios and SQL Services your self directly. There are a number of options, but the key for IBM I, is the IBM i SQL Services  https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/1119123  

We had a long running PRM open with IBM support on SNMP functionality;  at the end of that road we basically agreed that the current SNMP measurements are for the Power server itself,  and not the individual LPAR which holds the IP address one is querying.    According to support,  it's "working as expected".    We created a RFE ( https://ibm-power-systems.ideas.ibm.com/ideas/IBMI-I-3530 ) to request that it actually returns information specific to the lpar being queried. 

We're now going down the route of Prometheus and Jesse Gorzinski's open source jdbc exporter ( https://github.com/ThePrez/prometheus-exporter-jdbc ) to capture the data.  Then we'd have our enterprise monitoring system query this secondary location.

Are there any comparisons documented between the use of JTOpen vs SNMP when monitoring resources on the IBM iSeries?

Are there limitations for either protocol or benefits that would help make a choice between monitoring solutions?

Thanks for your support!

Regards,
Greg