How eG Enterprise Monitors the IBM pSeries Server and its AIX LPARs?

To address the monitoring concerns of LPAR administrators and to quickly lead them to the root-cause of performance slowdowns experienced by LPARs, eG Enterprise provides an "agentless" IBM pSeries monitoring model. This model adopts an 'In-N-Out' approach to monitoring an IBM pSeries server and its AIX LPARs alone. This approach involves a single eG agent operating on a remote Windows/Solaris/Linux host in the environment, which performs the following tasks (see Figure 1):

1. Connects to the HMC server in the environment via HTTP/HTTPS;
2. Automatically discovers the IBM pSeries servers managed by the HMC, and the AIX LPARs configured on each server;
3. Uses HMC to pull out the percentage of the server’s physical resources that the AIX LPARs on the server are using - i.e., the relative loading of the AIX LPARs. This represents the view of how an LPAR and its applications are doing from the “outside” - i.e., from outside the AIX LPAR.
4. Connects to each AIX LPAR on the target pSeries server via SSH to report on the resource usage of the AIX LPARs and the applications running inside the AIX LPARs (as seen from within the guest LPAR). This represents the view from within the AIX LPAR - i.e., the “inside” view. 

Figure 1 : How the eG single agent monitors an IBM pSeries Server