ITM means IBM Tivoli Monitoring and is part of the Tivoli software suite for cross platform Systems Management performance monitoring. I has been around a long time and is a very feature rich product. In this blog was don't want to list some of its 100's of features but it is fully Power Systems Aware and captures all the advanced stats from new features of POWER6 and POWER7.  Here we just want to point out that it can capture all the information you want and display is any way you want from its database of stats that it collects from its agents on each Virtual Machine (LPAR).  So here is a couple of sample graphs to give you the idea - these are taken from two presentation on ITM where there are 60 screen shots of various stats.

Below is the VM's of one machine:

Note:

• The Green circle highlight two VM (LPAR) running ar 6 physical CPUs and 1 physical CPU - the others are idle.
• The Blue oblong shows AIX, Linux and VIOS using all the memory it has been given - this is normal an good for performance.
• The Red oblong shows that it is monitoring 22 VM on this machine - the below graph shows it can sort the VM to busiest first, which is useful for machines with high numbers of VM's

Below We have ordered by use graphs:

Here the two busy Virtual Machines are at one end (as its sorted).

• From the Green ellipses we see Utilisation compared to Entitlement (500% of the 1.2 Entitled CPU) and the Physical CPU use of 6 CPUs.
• And the Idle VM's are using just 1 to 3 percent of there entitlement which is very efficient.

Pro:

• IBM Tivoli Monitoring is a very powerful performance stats capture and graphical display tool.
• Fully POWER processor aware - also will capture VIOS like Shared Ethernet Adapters (SEA) and Workload Partitions (WPARs) stats.
  
• Cross platform so its not just for IBM machines and operating systems.
• Fully supported by IBM and you can hire services for initial setup and skills transfer.
  

Cons:

• Due to its features, it is large, requires its own VM, and so takes man-power for initial setup and configuration.
• Regular use needed to get the most from it.
• Cost - although it is included in the Systems Director Enterprise Edition at a much lower price.

Tags:  aix power power7 power6 cec monitoring itm performance vm