Monitoring an AIX host

CPU usage - percentage

The CPU usage values, when combined, provide a detailed view of how the CPU resources are being utilized on a host.

To collect more accurate CPU usage in an AIX LPAR environment, you must set useMpstat to true as shown in the following example:

com.instana.plugin.host:
  useMpstat: true

Datapoint: Filesystem

Memory usage

On the AIX LPAR environment, the used value is computed in percentage by using the formula (computational + non-computational) ÷ real total.

The non-computational is a part of used memory, which has a relatively high used value. A high used value doesn't necessarily indicate a need for more memory.

The determination of memory over-commitment is based on the comparison between computational memory and the real memory in the system. Therefore, the percentage of computational is more informative for estimating memory usage on AIX.

Datapoint: AIX perfstat_memory_total interface

Datapoint: Filesystem

Average Run Queue (1h)

CPU load - average

The CPU load metric displays the value on a graph for a selected time period.

To collect accurate CPU load, in the AIX LPAR environment, you must set useMpstat to true as shown in the following example:

com.instana.plugin.host:
  useMpstat: true

Datapoint: Filesystem

CPU usage - total

CPU Events

Datapoint: Filesystem

CPU load - peak

Individual CPU Usage

The CPU usage metric displays the following metrics in percentage on a graph for a selected time period for each CPU:

Datapoint: Filesystem

Memory

The following table outlines the unit for memory:

You can view all values on a graph for a time period that you select.

Datapoint: AIX perfstat_memory_total interface

System I/O Events

System I/O Events capture low-level interactions between the operating system and hardware, including system calls and read or write operations at both logical and physical levels. These metrics provide visibility into system I/O behavior and help identify performance bottlenecks.

Volume groups

A volume group in AIX is a logical storage pool that consists of one or more physical volumes. It provides a flexible way to manage logical volumes and allocate storage dynamically.

The following table provides key details about a volume group:

Physical volumes

Physical volumes are raw storage devices (disks or partitions) that are initialized for use in an AIX Volume Group.

The following table provides key details about a physical volumes:

Disks

The following table covers metrics that are related to disk

Process statistics

Process statistics metrics provide insights into the state and behavior of processes and threads on the system.

Filesystems

These metrics provide insights into file system performance, capacity, and usage, allowing administrators to monitor and optimize their storage systems effectively.

Datapoint: Filesystem

* The total, read, and write usage datapoint metrics display the disk I/O utilization as a percentage.

* Leaked (refers to deleted files that are in use and equates to capacity - used - free. You can find these files with lsof | grep deleted).

** The Total Utilization, Read Utilization, and Write Utilization datapoints are not supported for Network File Systems (NFS).

By default, Instana only monitors local file systems. You can list the file systems that are monitored or excluded in the configuration.yaml file.

The name for the configuration setting is the device name, which you can obtain from the first column of mtab file or df command output.

You must specify temporary file systems in the following format: tmpfs:/mount/point.

The following example shows the list of file systems that are monitored:

com.instana.plugin.host:
  filesystems:
    - '/dev/sda1'
    - 'tmpfs:/sys/fs/cgroup'
    - 'server:/usr/local/pub'

The following example shows the file systems that are included or excluded:

com.instana.plugin.host:
  filesystems:
    include:
      - '/dev/xvdd'
      - 'tmpfs:/tmp'
      - 'server:/usr/local/pub'
    exclude:
      - '/dev/xvda2'

com.instana.plugin.host:
  nfs_all: true

Network interfaces

The following table outlines the network traffic and errors per an interface.

Datapoint: Filesystem

TCP activity

These metrics provide insights into TCP connection activity, including established connections, segment transmission rates, and error occurrences.

Datapoint: Filesystem

Process top list

These metrics offer insights into running processes, including their process ID, name, CPU usage, normalized CPU usage, and memory consumption. The top process list is updated every 30 seconds and the list contains only the processes with system usage. For example, the processes with more than 10% CPU usage over the last 30 seconds or processes with more than 512 MB memory usage (RSS) are displayed in the process top list.

To create a combined list of processes from the top 10 CPU and memory usage lists, set combineTopProcesses to true. The processes are included in the combined list even if their CPU usage is less than 10% or memory usage is less than 512 MB. If the same process is listed in the top 10 CPU and top 10 memory usage lists, it is listed only once in the combined list, which can include up to 20 entries.

com.instana.plugin.host:
  combineTopProcesses: true

Linux top semantics are used. 100% CPU refers to full use of a single CPU core, and you can search a history of snapshots from the previous month. The normalized CPU is calculated by dividing the CPU by the number of logical processors.

Datapoint: Filesystem