IBM PureData System for Analytics, Version 7.1

Monitoring tools

Read about the monitoring tools available with IBM® Netezza® Platform Development Software.

Netezza Performance Portal

IBM Netezza Platform Development Software comes with Netezza Performance Portal configured and started after the installation.

You can access the tool from a web browser after pointing it to the IBM Netezza Platform Development Software IP address.

In addition to the configuration data, that also available from the CLI tools like nzhw and nzds, the portal displays resource utilization, and performance data for both, the current moment, and historically. Resource utilization includes CPU, memory, disk I/O and network for NPS® Host and SPUs. Measurements for SPUs are shown as average and maximum value computed for all processing units.

Figure 1. Resource monitoring in Netezza Performance Portal

CLI tools

Table 1 presents additional CLI tools that can be used to monitor utilization.

Table 1. Performance reporting CLI
Command	From	Behavior
top	RHEL	Displays top Linux tasks that cause resources utilization.
ps -aux	RHEL	Displays snapshot of the current processes and their resource utilization.
free	RHEL	Displays memory usage.
nz_spu_top	SWST	Displays CPU and disk utilization for SPUs.
tcpdump	RHEL	Dumps network traffic.

vSphere Client

The vSphere platform provides a very useful monitoring tool – vSphere Client. The tool can be run as a Windows application or it can be accessed from the browser. It allows for comprehensive virtualization platform management, which includes resources utilization, and performance monitoring of hardware and virtual components (ESXi nodes, virtual machines, data stores, virtual networks etc.). You can display the monitoring data in real time, or historically:

Figure 2. vCenter Client performance monitoring of ESXi node

The tool can also display events and alarms for vSphere objects, including virtual machines, and for monitored hardware (see Figure 3). The alarms can be forwarded as SNMP traps or sent using SMTP by vCenter Server.

Figure 3. vCenter Client alarms view

Netezza Software Support Tools

IBM Netezza Platform Development Software also comes with Netezza Software Support Tools package installed in /nz/support directory.

Among many tools available in this package, one is particularly important in problem determination: nz_check_disk_scan_speed. This tool can be used only when NPS is idle. When called, it creates a test table in system database and uses it to determine disk scan speed. By default, it uses 0.5 GB test table and measures average read performance for all data slices. The size can be changed using the –size parameter. Other useful invocations are shown in Table 2.

Table 2. nz_check_disk_scan_speed command
Command	Behavior
nz_check_disk_scan_speed	Checks read speed and prints average value for all slices.
nz_check_disk_scan_speed -dsid	Checks read speed and displays separate result for each data slice.
nz_check_disk_scan_speed -write	Checks write speed and prints average value for all slices.
nz_check_disk_scan_speed –cpu	Runs CPU intensive test.

cliqa command

cliqa is a Netezza Platform Software kit tool that helps to assess network performance. Depending on the command line parameters, the tool can measure network transmission rate for various cases, as shown in the following table.

Table 3. cliqa command
Command	Behavior
cliqa –fcomm_spu2spu 0 500	Measures SPU data distribution rate.
cliqa –fcomm_host_dist 8929 1000	Measures host data distribution rate.
cliqa –fcomm_bcast 0 10000	Measures broadcast rate.