Configure monitoring software for standalone systems

Find out how to set up Opensource monitoring software applications to centrally monitor system performance and availability on IBM® zSystems.

The ability to centrally monitor system performance and availability is an essential part of enterprise computing environment administration. A variety of Opensource monitoring software applications are available to perform these tasks.

The three tools selected for this use case are:

  • Performance Co-Pilot (PCP)

  • Prometheus

  • Grafana

This document describes how to set up and configure these three tools on IBM z System logical partitions (LPARs).

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Publication date: September 2022.

Performance Co-Pilot

At the lowest level, Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) collects performance data on individual systems. You can use PCP commands such as pcp-atop and pmiostat and so on in place of the equivalent, standard non-graphical tools, such as top, iostat and so on. For cross-reference information about the standard performance commands and their PCP equivalents, see Side-by-side comparison of PCP tools with legacy tools.

The PCP pmchart command can plot the PCP data on a alphanumeric terminal. For this use case, the graphical capabilities of Prometheus and Grafana are used to plot the PCP data.

For an introduction to PCP, see Performance Co-Pilot on Red Hat® Enterprise

Prometheus

Prometheus is an Opensource systems monitoring and alerting toolkit. For this use case, Prometheus processes the data provided by the PCP instances from the client systems. Node Exporter is part of Prometheus and it is required to export the performance data from Prometheus to other nodes.

For more information about Prometheus, see What is Prometheus? and What is Node Exporter?

Grafana

Grafana is a data-visualization platform, which helps you to create and view the alerting, charts, graphs, and so on from the collected metrics of multiple other data sources. For this use case, Prometheus provides the data to Grafana for visualisation.

For more information about Grafana, see What is Grafana?

The next sections guide you through the steps to complete the setup.