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
