Welcome to the Application Performance Management Blog, where you can read the perspectives from APM experts. This Blog provides insights into the Application Performance Management solution, as well as technical details about specific IBM products.
After a colder than normal winter in North Carolina, Spring is finally here. While today's high of 45F is nearly 20 degrees below normal, this past Saturday gave a taste of Spring with a beautiful, sunny 74F day. After hibernating most of the Winter, these turtles came out in force at a local pond to see what is new under the sun.
So what else is new this Spring? It is the new ITM HMC Base agent v6.2.2.3, and it might replace your CEC Base agent. If you have used the CEC Base agent, you have probably know the requirement that the AIX perfagent.tools fileset has to be at a certain level to avoid problems (see Required perfagent.tools Versions). And this requirement is for all the LPARs on the CEC. If you are down level, it can be a lot of work to upgrade all your LPARs.
So, we have added CPU attributes to the HMC Base agent in version 6.2.2.3 and the HMC agent does not have the perfagent.tools requirement! There are a couple of new but minimal requirements to use the new HMC agent:
HMC Version 7 Release 7.3 or later
The HMC Base agent was updated to retrieve CPU usage sampling events using the lslparutil HMC command. The HMC must be configured to collect these samples by using the chlparutil HMC command. See the HMC documentation for more information about the lslparutil and chlparutil commands.
The main new function is that HMC Base agent collects CPU data, same as the CEC Base agent, but the HMC agent gets the data from HMC, while the CEC agent has to communicate with each LPAR to get the data. Here is a partial list of the new function in v6.2.2.3:
The HMC Base agent was updated to retrieve CPU usage sampling events using the lslparutil HMC command.
In V6.2.2.3, the HMC Base agent represents each server as an IBM Tivoli Monitoring subnode. With these subnodes, each Server is represented by a separate node in the Tivoli Enterprise Portal navigation tree under the HMC Base agent node. When a situation affects an individual server or resources for the server, the affected server is immediately identifiable. Representing each server as a subnode also provides for the creation and association of server-specific situation threshold values.
The HMC Base agent includes Self Describing Agent support when the agent is installed in the same CANDLEHOME as an IBM Tivoli Monitoring V6.2.3 Fix Pack 1 Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Agent.
New attribute groups and attributes were added to monitor CPU utilization for Servers, CPU_Pools, and LPARs.
New workspaces that can be used to drill down from Servers to Pools to LPARs through IBM Tivoli Monitoring dynamic workspace links were added to the agent.
IBM Tivoli Monitoring for System p V6.2.2 Interim Feature 3, English
(CIH93EN) (Both agent and support files are included in this one
package)
IBM Tivoli Monitoring for System p V6.2.2 Interim Feature 3, Language Support, Multiplatform, Multilingual (CIH94ML)
Give it try - I think you will really like it! Remember that you can always find the latest information on the System p agent at the System p Agents Troubleshooting Wiki.
After a colder than normal winter in North Carolina, Spring is finally here. While today's high of 45F is nearly 20 degrees below normal, this past Saturday gave a taste of Spring with a beautiful, sunny 74F day. After hibernating most of the Winter, these turtles came out in force at a local pond to see what is new under the sun.
