AIX Server Performance Monitoring

AIX Performance Monitoring for Top User Experience

Performance monitoring of AIX servers and the applications they host is critical for ensuring that business can operate effectively. Slowdowns can result in frustrated users, loss of productivity and increased support costs for the enterprise.

In some cases AIX servers may also be virtualized, and if a server goes down or slows down, all the logical partitions (LPARs) may fail or slow down. Thus, a single server can bring down a number of business critical applications. So when AIX virtualization is deployed, the need for AIX server monitoring and management becomes even more critical.

Why Monitor Every Aspect of AIX Server Performance?

When an AIX server slows down, administrators have to determine what is causing the slowdown: could it be because of a hardware problem? Could it be because of a malfunctioning application running on the server? Or could it be because the server is not sized correctly to handle the workload that it is seeing? If there is a bottleneck on the server, which resource is the bottleneck – is it CPU, or memory, or disk, or network?

For effective AIX monitoring, administrators need access to metrics from every layer of the server. They should be able to compare performance across these layers to diagnose exactly where the performance bottleneck lies. While server monitoring is important, administrators also need to be able to look in-depth into application performance.

eG Enterprise: Single-Source Performance AIX Server and Application Performance Monitoring

eG Enterprise is a 100% web-based performance monitoring solution for AIX infrastructures. eG Enterprise provides a single console from which administrators can track the status of their AIX server farms, receive alerts when problems happen, view reports on historical performance, and plan the capacity of their server farms.

To monitor a AIX server, eG Universal Agent can be deployed on the server in a matter of minutes with very little configuration required. Agentless monitoring is also supported. Administrators can choose the servers to be monitored with agents (e.g., critical production servers) and those that can be monitored in an agentless manner (e.g., staging servers). Key features:

Key features:

• Choose either agent-based and agentless monitoring capabilities for each server in the infrastructure
• End-to-end visibility with low overhead on the target systems
• Use a single agent to monitor multiple services running on the same server
• Auto-upgrading agents require minimal ongoing maintenance
• Extensive historical reports included for extensive, out-of-the-box analysis and planning
• Cost-effective monitoring of the target infrastructure through eG's flexible agent deployment and licensing model

Ultimate Performance Management Flexibility

To monitor server hardware, eG Enterprise relies on native AIX commands, and integration with IBM Director is also supported. Monitoring of the server operating system is based on native commands and scripts. Every aspect of operating system performance – including the usage of key CPU, memory, disk and network resources are tracked, plus system logs.

The same agent that monitors the AIX operating system can also be used to monitor applications running on the server. Popular applications like the IBM WebSphere web server, Java application server, IBM DB2 Universal Database (UDB), IBM WebSphere MQ, etc., can be monitored. Other applications hosted on AIX such as Oracle database servers, WebLogic or JBoss application servers, enterprise applications like SAP and others can also be monitored using eG Enterprise. For a complete list supported platforms, see "All Technologies".

Integrated Monitoring of AIX and Windows Servers

eG Enterprise uses a unique layer model representation to depict the performance of different layers of a AIX server (e.g., hardware, operating system, network, TCP/IP, application processes, etc.). A similar layer model representation is also used for other operating systems that eG Enterprise supports (e.g., Microsoft Windows 2012, 2008, 2003, 2000, Solaris, Linux, HPUX, OS/400, and OpenVMS). This way, eG Enterprise provides a single pane of glass from where administrators can monitor their heterogeneous multi-vendor data center servers from a single console and with a single unified representation model. This greatly simplifies the monitoring and management of heterogeneous server farms.

Alerting and Reporting on AIX Performance

Baselines for all the key metrics are pre-defined in eG Enterprise based on industry standard best practices. eG Enterprise can also determine automatic thresholds for other metrics based on an analysis of past history. The actual metrics are compared with the thresholds to determine where the problems lie in the infrastructure.

With eG Enterprise in place, AIX administrators can start receiving alerts when a key process fails, a critical event is logged in the server log, or when a disk fills up.

eG Enterprise also provides extensive web-based reporting of all the collected metrics. Admins can receive periodic, detailed reports of the performance of their server farm without even logging into the console.

Key Benefits

• Single-pane-of-glass monitoring of AIX server farms
• Helps eliminate downtime and application slowdowns with automatic root-cause diagnosis and proactive alerts
• Lowers support costs
• 100% web-based architecture for anywhere-access
• Data analysis, trending, and reporting capabilities for future planning and increased AIX server ROI

Why eG? One Monitor to Manage All of IT.

• eG Enterprise is the only single pane-of-glass, virtualization-aware, auto-diagnostic IT infrastructure performance monitor
• Gain actionable answers to performance issues, wherever they originate, from application code to bare metal
• Understand the impact of infrastructure issues on application performance and user experience
• Unify IT performance monitoring, alerting, diagnosing, reporting, and capacity planning in a single console
• Ensure a great user experience and dramatically improve IT efficiency
• Benefit from flexible deployment options (on-premises and SaaS) and IT monitoring approaches (agentless and agent-based)