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Increase Visibility for Power Virtual Server with IBM Cloud Monitoring Service

By SHADI Albouyeh posted Mon September 09, 2024 02:22 PM

  

What is IBM Power Virtual Server?

Power Systems to the Cloud! A virtual machine as-as-service offering with close architecture parity to well-known enterprise Power Systems servers, access to 100+ services on IBM Cloud and the benefits of pay-as-you go consumption model. IBM Power Virtual Server enables frictionless migration to IBM Cloud as a dependable failover solution with high availability and disaster recovery for production workloads. Due to these inherent benefits of cloud computing including increased agility, flexibility, and cost efficiency, clients are migrating their workloads to help establish a true hybrid cloud environment for greater return on their IT investments. 

IBM Cloud Monitoring with Sysdig

While transitioning workloads to IBM Cloud helps organizations streamline operations, enhance agility with the option to leverage cloud services for improved performance and innovation, added complexity in day two operations does exist. Thus, with the initial integration of IBM Cloud Monitoring, a fully managed enterprise-grade monitoring service, with PowerVS this past year, clients gained visibility to the most essential metrics from PowerVS (CPU utilization of VM, memory utilization, incoming and outgoing network bytes, and total disk read/write bytes) to help proactively manage their infrastructure and applications. Given the demand for more insight into health and performance of PowerVS virtual machines, we are now eager to announce a new Linux based monitoring agent from IBM Cloud Monitoring with Sysdig for Power Systems servers.

Announcing IBM Cloud Monitoring Agent for Linux Based Power Virtual Server

With support for Power Systems, clients can now deploy the new Linux based agent in their Power Virtual Server workspace to automatically collect over 100 metrics including additional CPU, memory, file, file system, and network data points to addresses their advanced monitoring needs. After deploying the agent, metrics are automatically collected and routed to the Sysdig backend for analysis in the IBM Cloud Monitoring GUI via out of the box dashboards. Clients can get up and running in minutes with deeper visibility into their PowerVS workspace.

Value Proposition

Today, when client’s opt-in to enabling IBM Cloud Monitoring for their Power Virtual Server while creating a workspace or by deploying the Linux based agent via CLI, they will have access to metrics from the running systems in their account.


These metrics represent system health and performance, essentially providing the information on what is broken. Once the metrics are collected, they are routed to the Sysdig backend and can be viewed in the IBM Cloud Monitoring dashboard for further analysis in a unified view across all IBM Cloud services within a client’s account.

The main components of the dashboard entail widgets, time navigation, and panels which support time series, histogram, number graphs, table, text and top split views providing utmost flexibility to slice and dice data as needed.


Each dashboard consists of a series of panels that are configured to display specific data in various formats. With IBM Cloud Monitoring clients can:

  • Use predefined dashboards to get up and running in minutes
  • Customize their own dashboards to monitor infrastructure, applications, and metrics
  • Store and share dashboards in a single location

An Alerts module is also available in IBM Cloud Monitoring which displays a complete list of all existing alerts and provides create or edit functionality for users to manage their own alerts or modify existing ones.

Most clients who are worried about downtime or would like to have time to act before hitting an out of memory problem with any of their applications will find great value in the responsive components available with this tooling that notify when an event or issue occurs that requires attention. Events and issues are identified based on changes in the metric values collected.

To get a handle on problems before they impact operations:

  • Configure alerts 
  • Enable proactive notifications about metrics and events
  • Classify alerts based on severity
  • Notify by using a broad range of notification channels, including email, PagerDuty, Slack, VictorOps, OpsGenie, and web hook
  • Monitor alerts by using the Alerts module

Check it out Today!

With the integration of IBM Cloud Monitoring and Power Virtual Server clients have access to proper tools and practices to effectively aggregate, correlate and analyze data for monitoring, troubleshooting, and debugging their Power Virtual Server virtual machines, and applications running on them alongside other cloud services being consumed in conjunction to meet their end users’ expectations, SLAs, compliance requirements and other enterprise business needs.  

To learn more about IBM Power Virtual Server and the Cloud Monitoring integration options check out the IBM Cloud docs pages below:

1.        Getting Started with Power Virtual Server

2.        Monitoring Metrics for IBM Power Virtual Server

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