gmon - A graphical LPar Monitor for Windows XP

gmon allows you to graphically monitor several AIX 5.3TL5+ , AIX6, Linux LPars and/or VIO Servers running on POWER5 or POWER6 servers from a PC or Laptop running Windows XP.

gmon v61

April 7th 2008

Final Version 61m posted (gmon_v61m).

Documentation

Latest Installation Guide is here & the latest User Guide is here (both of these are also within the gmon zip file)

gmon version 6 has the following new features:

Frame awareness - when you monitor an LPar (AIX,VIO or Linux) gmon extracts the last 5 digits of the serial number and uses this to track which server the LPar is located on and automatically draws a new frame Utilization meter if required. gmon will also now follow an LPar if it is migrated from one Frame to another using a partition migration operation (AIX and Linux).
Changes to dials - these are now smaller and are not displayed by default - you can turn them on using the "display dials" switch
Support fo rthe latest versions of Linux - The linuxagent is now compiled agent the latest glib v2.4 libraries - a version of the agent for older glib versions is also provided (see notes on Linux installation below)
Linux hostname - the linuxagent now uses the linux hostname as the LPar name - Within Linux it's not possible to report the LPar name the Linux hostname is used instead to help identify which LPar is being monitored.
The Frame utilization has been reduced in size and information is now displayed in the title bar - The frame Utilization meters are automatically generated as new LPars are added to the monitor.
A visual alert will be shown on AIX (& VIO) dials if the fr:sr is > 10 and/or if there is paging out to the page space

Below is a snap shot of the tool monitoring lots of LPARs and the CPU Utilization Meters for the two frames being monitored.

Brief Installation Guide for existing Users - see PDF's inside zip file for full installation guide

On Windows

Uninstall the current version of gmon - Then run setup.exe to install gmon v61

On AIX

uninstall any existing gmon agents - # rpm -e gmon-2h-1 gmon-6-b1 - to install the new gmon v6 agent

#rpm -Uvh gmon-v61.rpm

(ON AIX 6. use may have to use # rpm -Uvh --ignoreos gmon-v61.rpm)

On VIO servers

perform the above steps for AIX having got to the root shell using oem_setup_env

On Linux

Kill the existing linuxagent - delete the linuxagent* from /usr/local/bin - install the new agent linuxagent61 to /usr/local/bin - modify the S99linuxagent61 script in /etc/rc.d/rc5.d to start linuxagent61

*If when you run linuxagent61 you see an error that looks something like this:

./S99linuxagent61 : command not foundine 1:

/usr/local/bin/linuxagent61: /lib64/tls/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.4' not found (required by /usr/local/bin/linuxagent61)

You can fix this by copying the file linuxagent61-pre-glib-2.4 from the plinuxagent folder to

/usr/local/bin/linuxagent61

chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/linuxagent61

Getting Started:

Download the file gmon-v61m.zip - this is the latest version and supports AIX6.1 and Partition Mobility - the older version gmon-v42e.zipis still available
This is a standard Zip archive file.
Installation instructions are contained within the Zip file - see the two brief README PDF files for Installing and Running.
You will need at least Windows XP Service pack 2 and to install a daemon on each LPAR as the root user. These daemons can however be run as a non-priveliged user should you wish.

Disclaimers

gmon is a demonstration tool. As such this software is delivered "as is" and is a use at your own risk tool.
gmon has no implied or explicit warranty, no support is provided for gmon.
gmon should not be used on Production systems.

Technical Bits

gmon uses port 15050 to talk between the windows GUI and agents
You can connect to the gmon agent using telnet - this can be useful to help debug problems with gmon - and confirm your firewall is allowing communications

From Windows

c:\> telnet hostname 15050

you should then see lines like the following every time you hit return

AIX,Shared,0.0,0.6,0.0,99.3,0.01,1.8,0.7,0.0,4,Uncapped,128,4,43,SMT On,p6lpar5-AIX6,3,2048,456,0,0,0,0,0,C0ED60,1,4,4,4,ED60,1,4,
AIX,Shared,0.1,1.2,0.0,98.7,0.01,2.4,1.3,0.0,4,Uncapped,128,4,43,SMT On,p6lpar5-AIX6,3,2048,456,0,0,0,0,0,C0ED60,1,4,4,4,ED60,1,4,
AIX,Shared,0.0,0.6,0.0,99.3,0.01,1.7,0.7,0.0,4,Uncapped,128,4,43,SMT On,p6lpar5-AIX6,3,2048,456,0,0,0,0,0,C0ED60,1,4,4,4,ED60,1,4,

Q&A

gmon Questions and Answers are found in a Community Forum - the gmon developer responds here
Performance Tools Forum

Source Code

The windows GUI is written in Visual Basic 6 (Learning Edition) - The code is not exactly a text book example of correct programming style and so remains private for now.

The linux and aix agents are written in C - many code segments being donated by Nigel Griffiths the author of nmon.

The AIX agent source code is here and the Linux agent source code is here

The AIX agent code is compiled using # cc -o aixagent61 aixagent61.c -lperfstat

The Linux agent code is compiledusing # gcc -m64 -o linuxagent61 linuxagent61.c

Always insterested if anyone has any ideas on how to improve the agent code

Known Problems with v61k

gmon sometimes reports Frame utilization of 101% on systems that are 100% busy - this is due to rounding errors as individual LPars CPU consumption are added up
Any problems involving "Bad Serial number" messages may be fixed by upgrading to to latest version of gmon.
AIX needs to be at version 5.3TL5 or above or AIX6