Servers

In network-level management, maintaining the status and connectivity of the network, is a picture at a higher level. It is of prime importance to know the status of the machines in the network, how loaded (or overloaded) they are and how efficiently they are utilized (or overused) to enable necessary corrective administrative functions to be performed on the identified overloaded/poorly performing systems.

Server-level management is a down-to-earth concept which involves lot of manual intervention, human resources, and administrative tasks to be performed. Applications Manager provides with a server-level monitoring functionality to achieve such goals and to ease the process of configuration management of hosts.

Supported Operating Systems

1. Windows

2. Linux

3. Sun Solaris

4. IBM AIX (Page Space Details)

5. IBM AS400/iSeries

6. HP Unix

7. Tru64 Unix

8. FreeBSD

9. Mac OS

10. Novell

Monitored Parameters

Availability tab, gives the Availability history for the past 24 hours or 30 days. Performance tab gives the Health Status and events for the past 24 hours or 30 days. List view enables you to perform bulk admin configurations. Click on the individual monitors listed, to view the following information.

Note: Option is provided for ignoring the monitoring of a specific disk drive in a server. Open <AMServer.properties> file in <AppManager Home/Conf> and add the drive that you do not want to monitor to <am.disks.ignore>. For eg.,

# The drives beginning with the characters given below will not be monitored in server monitor.
am.disks.ignore=C:

Here, monitoring will not happen for C: drive. Likewise, you can add further disks comma separated(C;D:,/home).

The following table briefs the parameters monitored & the mode of monitoring ( - yes).

Operating System	Telnet	SSH	SNMP	WMI
Windows				(only if Applications Manager is installed on windows machine)
Linux
Solaris
HP-UX / Tru64 Unix
FreeBSD
Mac OS
IBM AIX
Novell
Attributes
CPU Utilization (all types except Windows NT)
Disk Utilization (all types)
Physical Memory Utilization (IBM AIX -only for root user, Windows - WMI mode, all other types)
Swap Memory Utilization (IBM AIX - only for root user, FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, Windows, Novell)
Network Interface (all types)				[status attribute data is not available]
Process Monitoring (all types)
Process Monitoring - Memory Utilization (all types)
Process Monitoring - CPU Utilization (IBM AIX - FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OS, Solaris, HP Unix / Tru64)
Service Monitoring (only for Windows )
Event log (only for Windows )
System Load (IBM AIX, FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OS, HP-Unix, Solaris, Novell )
Disk I/O Stats (only for IBM AIX, Linux, Solaris, Novell)
Hardware monitoring ( Dell & HP)

When it comes to choosing the mode of monitoring for servers, we recommend Telnet/SSH over SNMP.

Page Space in AIX Servers:

To get in-depth details on Page Space in AIX servers, you can use the following command "lsps -a".

The command "lspa -a" lists the location of the paging space logical volumes as they were, not as they are.

Normally page spaces are used when the process running in the system has used the entire allocated memory and it has run out of memory space. It then uses the page spaces in the system to move the piece of code/data that is not currently referenced by the running process into the page space area so that it could be moved back to the Primary memory when it is been referenced again by the currently running process.

While trying to monitor the AIX server, if you get "No data Available" for Page Space, you can troubleshoot it by following the steps given below:

First, you need to establish connection only through TELNET or SSH mode.

Second, check whether the command lsps -a exists in the system and then execute it.

Displaying Paging Space Characteristics

The "lsps" command displays the characteristics of paging spaces, such as the paging space name, physical volume name, volume group name, size, percentage of the paging space used, whether the space is active or inactive, and whether the paging space is set to automatic. The paging space parameter specifies the paging space whose characteristics are to be shown.

The following examples show the use of lsps command with various flags to obtain the paging space information. The "-c" flag will display the information in colon format and paging space size in physical partitions.

# lsps -a

Adding and Activating a Paging Space

To make a paging space available to the operating system, you must add the paging space and then make it available. The total space available to the system for paging is the sum of the sizes of all active paging-space logical volumes.

Note: You should not add paging space to volume groups on portable disks because removing a disk with an active paging space will cause the system to crash.

You can get more details about the command here: http://web.utanet.at/mario/exam/5129c72.htm

Apart from the above mentioned parameters, you can also monitor the following

• Processes

• Windows Services

• Network Interface

To monitor processes in a server

1. In the Server Monitor page under Process Details, click Add New Process.
2. All the processes that are running would be displayed along with CPU and Memory utilization statistics. (Only memory statistics is shown for Windows and SNMP mode of monitoring)
3. Select the processes that you want to monitor.

After configuring the processes, they are listed under the Process Details section of the Server Monitor page. By clicking on the process, you can view its availability graph. You can also configure alarms for a particular process.

You can edit the Display Name, Process Name, Commands and Arguments of the particular process by clicking on the Edit Process icon.

 

 

To monitor windows services

 

Note: Windows Services monitoring is possible only in WMI mode of monitoring

1. In the Windows Monitor page, under Service Details, click Add New Service
2. All the services that are running would be displayed along with service name and status.
3. Select the services that you want to monitor.

After configuring the services, they are listed under the Service Details section of the Windows Monitor page. By clicking on the service, you can view its availability graph. You can also configure alarms for the availability of that particular service.

 

Apart from monitoring the availability of the service, you can manage the services by using the start, stop, restart options. When the service goes down, you can configure action "Restart the Service " along with other actions.

 

To monitor Network Interfaces

 

Note: Network Interface monitoring is possible only in SNMP and WMI mode of monitoring

 

In the Server Monitor page, under Network Interfaces, all the network interfaces will be listed. The various attributes that can be monitored are:

• Interface Traffic - Input traffic (bits received), Output Traffic (bits transmitted). You can set alarm thresholds for these attributes.

• Interface utilization - Input Utilization %, Output Utilization %. You can set alarm thresholds for these attributes.

• Packets received - Packets received per second

• Packets transmitted - Packets transmitted per second

• Error packets - No. of packets in error per second after receiving the packets

• Discarded packets - No. of packets discarded per second after receiving the packets

• Health - the health of the interface based on the attributes

• Status - whether the interface is up or down (shown only in SNMP mode of monitoring)

Associating Scripts and URLs to the Host Resource:

By associating a script or a URL to a Host resource, their attributes become one among the other attributes of the Host and their data is also shown under Host Details itself. Health of the Host resource is dependent on the Health of the Scripts and URLs as well.

For eg., If you wish to monitor RequestExecutionTime, RequestsCurrent, RequestsDisconnected of the ASP.NET application, WMI scripts can be used to get the statistics (this info is not available when Applications Manager is used). You can write your own script that would fetch these details then configure this script to the Applications Manager. After configuring this script to the Applications Manager you can associate this script to the host monitor itself. Then the attributes of the script would behave like the other attributes of the Host monitor. Hence, you can configure in such a way that the Health of the script directly affects the Health of the host.

Likewise, If you want to monitor a website hosted in a system in such a way that, whenever there is a change in the health of the website, the health of the server should reflect the change. In this case you can configure the URL monitor and then associate that url to the host. Hence, if the website is down, the health of the Host resource is affected.

• Associate/Remove Scripts: Click on 'Associate/Remove Scripts' link in Host Details. Scripts that are associated and that are not associated with the Host would be listed. Accordingly, you can then select the scripts that you want to associate or remove.

• Associate/Remove URLs: Click on 'Associate/Remove URLs' link in Host Details. URLs that are associated and that are not associated with the Host would be listed. Accordingly, you can then select the URLs that you want to associate or remove.

See Also

Creating New Monitor - Servers