The problem with these tools is other than the pretty charts, do they
help solve the problems? That ability to solve problems comes with
experience - difficult to write tools to solve problems if having no
experience with those problems. Installations that run Linux on 'Z'
have greater requirements than distributed servers - running at higher
utilization, expected for Z, requires complete data, trend data,
automatic data capture. The platform has been around for near 15 years
- with lots of experience available. Can you go back months with a tool
and see when the problem started, and what caused it? Or do you just
reboot?
On 11/9/2014 1:38 PM, Tito Garrido wrote:
If you are going to try SAR take a look on KSAR project...
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ksar/
Regards,
Tito
On Sun, Nov 9, 2014 at 1:30 PM, Barton Robinson <bar...@velocitysoftware.com
wrote:
I just had an installation demonstrate the perfect tool for you. In
looking at what alerts should be set for operations, one of their many
zlinux servers had a swap full condition. They were able to go back thru
reports from last 12 months, took less than a minute to identify when the
swap filled up, and what processes were running in the linux server at that
time. This was with a full web interface, all automated. There were
daily, weekly, monthly reports created for linux, z/vm, network all
automatically and easily accessable thru their web interface.
If you would like to talk more, or maybe talk to some of the hundreds of
installations that run this, that can be arranged.
On 11/8/2014 2:36 PM, Mikael Wargh wrote:
Hello,
We have several zLinuxes installed and been happy with the overall
functionality especially now when we got the new IBM wave tool installed.
However, Wave didn’t help is with the problem with the Linux level
reporting we currently have. z/VM performance reporter gives us current
overall status, but is not very helpful for longer period capacity trending
at least from single Linux perspective. Our company’s standard Patrol
agents show somewhat twisted and misleading information about Linux on z
especially on CPU point of view and this cannot be modified.
So…now I’m trying to find out which Linux tool could be used as a good
base for this reporting requirement. Nmon seems to be the best candidate so
far, haven’t tested SAR yet. Currently I get automated nmon reports from
one of our zLinux servers and they generate nice graphs with nmon_analyzer
Excel program. However, it’s not very convenient to manually create graphs
every day on your laptop…especially when we get reports from several
servers in the future.
On AIX you can use nmon2rrd which uses rrdtool for conversion. Also there
are some nmon2web scripts for AIX. For Linux you can get several nmon web
page generators which are often based on rrdtool and you have also couple
of viable SAR graph generating options. I have tried to find a good
solution for zLinux but so far haven’t been able to fill this automated web
page generation gap.
To sum this up:
- We need a performance reporting tool which can be fully automated via
Linux scripting or similar for multiple zLinux instances. As there seems to
be several freeware possibilities, we would prefer them.
- Currently I have created a routine which creates daily and weekly nmon
scripts which are then collected to central zLinux reporting server.
- Those nmon files are useful to our maintenance people, but we need also
simple graphs to other parties preferably in some picture/html format.
- Ideal solution would be some simple way to convert those nmon files to
html pages automatically as nmon2rrd does.
- One possibility would be to upload those nmon files to some AIX/x64
server and do the conversion there, but it would create extra data transfer
and to be honest would be quite embarrassing from zLinux point of view.
- Is there any alternative routes to do this or should I try to compile
some of these AIX/x64 tools to system z Linux?
- We use Redhat 6.4 and z/VM 6.3
Best regards,
Mikael Wargh
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