Unix Server Monitoring with eG Enterprise

What the eG Unix Server Monitor Reveals

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Most current day IT infrastructures are heterogeneous environments including a mix of different server hardware and operating systems. eG Enterprise offers 100% web-based, integrated Unix server monitoring of heterogeneous Unix server farms. Administrators can monitor and manage a variety of Unix operating systems such as Oracle Solaris, IBM AIX, Red Hat Linux, HPUX, Novell SuSE Linux, CentOS and Free BSD from a common console. A novel layer model representation is used to analyze and depict the performance of different protocol layers of the infrastructure - network, operating system, TCP/IP stack, critical application processes and services, etc. By using a common performance model representation across heterogeneous infrastructures, eG Enterprise ensures that administrators are not exposed to the differing nature of each operating system and hence, have a short learning curve.

The Unix server performance monitoring can be done in an agent-based or in an agentless manner, and administrators can pick and choose the servers that have to be monitored with agents (e.g., critical production servers) and those that can be monitored in an agentless manner (e.g., staging servers).

A single agent license suffices to monitor a server and the agent license is transportable across operating systems. Agent-based and agentless monitoring is supported for Sun Solaris, Red Hat Linux, Free BSD, SuSE Linux, HPUX, Tru64, and AIX operating systems.

Feature Summary

Windows Monitor

Capability

Metric

Description

CPU Monitoring

CPU utilization per processor of a server

.	Know if a server is sized correctly in terms of processing power;
.	Determine times of day when CPU usage level is high;

Run queue length of a server

.	Determine how many processes are contending for CPU resources simultaneously;

Top 10 CPU consuming processes on a server

.	Know which processes are causing a CPU spike on the server;

Top 10 servers by CPU utilization

.	Know which servers have high CPU utilization, and which ones are under-utilized;

Memory Monitoring

Free memory availability

.	Track free memory availability on your servers;
.	Determine if your servers are adequately sized in terms of memory availability;

Swap memory usage

.	Determine servers with high swap usage;

Top 10 processes consuming memory on the server

.	Know which processes are taking up memory on a server;

Top 10 servers by memory usage

.	Know which servers have the lowest free memory available and hence, may be candidates for memory upgrades;

I/O Monitoring

Blocked processes

.	Track the number of processes blocked on I/O;
.	Indicates if there is an I/O bottleneck on the server;

Disk activity

.	Track the percentage of time that the disks on a server are heavily used;
.	Compare the relative busy times of the disks on a server to determine if you can better balance the load across the disks of a server;

Disk read/write times

.	Monitor disk read and write times to detect instances when a disk is slowing down (Windows only);

Disk queue length

.	Track the number of processes queued on each disk drive to determine disk drives that may be responsible for slow downs;

Uptime Monitoring

Current uptime

.	Determine how long a server has been up;
.	Track times when a server was rebooted;
.	Determine times when unplanned reboots happened;

Top 10 servers by uptime

.	Know which servers have not been rebooted for a long time;

Disk Space Monitoring

Total capacity

.	Know the total capacity of each of the disk partitions of a server;

Free space

.	Track the free space on each of the disk partitions of a server;
.	Proactively be alerted of high disk space levels on a server;

Network Traffic Monitoring

Incoming and outgoing traffic

.	Track the traffic into and out of a server through each interface;
.	Identify servers and network interfaces with maximum traffic;

Unix Server Monitoring

Packet loss

.	Track the quality of a network connection to a Unix server;
.	Identify times when excessive packet loss happens;

Average delay

.	Determine the average delay of packets to a server;

Availability

.	Determine times when a server is not reachable over the network;

TCP Monitoring

Current connections

.	Track currently established TCP connections to a server;

Incoming/outgoing TCP connection rate

.	Monitor the server workload by tracking the rate of TCP connections to and from a server;

TCP retransmissions

.	Track the percentage of TCP segments retransmitted from the server to clients;
.	Be alerted when TCP retransmits are high and therefore, are likely to cause significant slowdowns in application performance;

Process Monitoring

Processes running

.	Track the number of processes of a specific application that are running simultaneously;
.	Identify times when a specific application process is not running;

CPU usage

.	Monitor the CPU usage of an application over time;
.	Determine times when an application is taking excessive CPU resources;

Memory usage

.	Track the memory usage of an application over time;
.	Identify if an application has a memory leak or not;

Unix System Log Monitoring

Events in /var/adm/messages log

.	Track and be alerted of all errors logged in the /var/adm/messages log of a Unix system;

Multi-tier IT infrastructures are a nightmare to troubleshoot because of the dependencies that exist between application tiers. For instance, a failure in the database tier could result in slow downs in the application and web server tiers. Hence, monitoring solutions that view the infrastructure as independent silos cannot effectively monitor and diagnose problems in such infrastructures. The addition of virtualization to such infrastructures makes monitoring and management of these infrastructures even more challenging!

Fig 1: A problem in one application can affect all the other applications involved in the service delivery.

Fig 2: Excessive disk reads by the media server slow down Oracle database accesses

Since a single VMware^® ESX/ESXi Server is used to host multiple virtual machines (VMs), a single malfunctioning application on a VM can degrade the performance seen by applications hosted on the other VMs. Figures 1 and 2 illustrate such an example. In this scenario, users are experiencing slowness in their access to a web-based service. From the service topology, it is clear that the database server is the cause of the slowdown. Figure 2 illustrates that since the database server is hosted on the same ESX/ESXi server as a media server, high I/O activity due to increased access to the media server is resulting in the database server seeing slow disk accesses. To accurately diagnose the problem in this example, a monitoring solution must not only consider the inter-dependencies between applications that are involved in service delivery, but it must also consider the existential relationships between applications, virtual machines, and physical machines. Besides resource contention among guest virtual machines, applications executing on the ESX/ESXi service console can also affect the performance of the virtual infrastructure.

While knowing which VM is consuming excessive resources is helpful, it is even more important to understand whether the VM's behavior is normal. For instance, a memory leak in one of the applications executing inside a VM may be causing the VM's memory usage to increase over time. In such cases, it is essential that the monitoring solution be able to look in-depth into each guest VM and detect abnormalities. While deploying individual agents inside each VM provides this level of visibility, this can result in additional resource overhead, licensing fees, and maintenance cost.

Performance degradations in a virtual infrastructure may also be because a virtual machine has not been configured with sufficient resources to handle its workload. A monitoring solution must be able to differentiate problems resulting from inadequate virtual machine configuration and those resulting from hot-spots created by uneven distribution of load across ESX/ESXi servers.