On Mon, Nov 08, 2021 at 12:31:35PM +0000, Laura Michaels via IBM Community wrote:
> Would appreciate any suggestions on useful monitoring tools and
> utilities to use on AIX. I've been looking through what's available
> with AIX toolbox. Other suggestions, especially Open Source ones
> appreciated. I'm thinking of porting and/or building some utility
> programs from source. Suggestions for FLOSS programs that may work
> well on AIX would be very helpful. Thanks.
AIX has a few ways built in to monitor already. I recommend using the
ODM and have errdaemon forward errpt messages directly to email and
syslog. This is really low level and only depends on working email.
https://adamssystems.nl/posts/simple-error-reporting/RSCT and RMC can also do resource monitoring and it's AIX native,
however it's fairly uncommon to set this up. I've only tried it with
filesystems.
https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/630479https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/718919Don't forget to configure your HMC to mail event alerts too!
Unfortunately I find email is the bottleneck for most alerting, and
often breaks upstream. YMMV. Maybe consider using an alternate channel
like sendxmpp on the monitor server.
As to the open source world, I have customers which are sending syslog
from AIX to Linux syslog servers, ELK and Splunk. The errpt forwarding
is very useful there. I really like centralizing with syslog-ng's
ability to save syslog data as a hierarchy (ie:
/var/log/HOSTS/$hostname/YYYY/MM/DD/loglevel) and using tools like
logtail or logmuncher to do reporting. No web services involved. ELK
and Splunk are cool, but they are large applications which require
significant customization.
I've had excellent experiences with Nagios and it's derivatives. The
plugins can just be shell scripts and quick to make ad-hoc on AIX. I
do prefer to do cron based "push" of checks to Nagios (ie: NCSA)
instead of running a root level daemon (ie: NRPE). Common Perl
libraries for submission run fine on AIX. Don't forget to set the
checks on Nagios to look for missing submissions (ie: stale
services).
For performance monitoring, nothing beats NMON and the new nmonchart
tool. I always setup NMON on every system logging to a dedicated 2GB
filesystem in /var/nmon. The HMC also has a built in performance
monitor now, make sure to enable it. I've seen customers successfully
use LPAR2RRD and Ganglia, however I wouldn't rely on setting those up
from the toolkit. AIX's snmpdv3 also supports HOSTMIB, so some
external monitoring tools can query information (ie: disks and
processes) once you configure it.
Let us know what else you discover or what you choose to implement.
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Russell Adams
Russell.Adams@AdamsSystems.nlPrincipal Consultant Adams Systems Consultancy
http://adamssystems.nl/
Original Message:
Sent: 11/8/2021 7:32:00 AM
From: Laura Michaels
Subject: monitoring tools and utilities
Would appreciate any suggestions on useful monitoring tools and utilities to use on AIX. I've been looking through what's available with AIX toolbox. Other suggestions, especially Open Source ones appreciated. I'm thinking of porting and/or building some utility programs from source. Suggestions for FLOSS programs that may work well on AIX would be very helpful. Thanks.
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Laura Michaels
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