IBM AIX

Introduction

IBM’s Advanced Interactive eXecutive, or AIX, is a series of proprietary UNIX-based operating systems built by IBM. AIX is the open standards-based UNIX operating system providing secure, scalable, and robust infrastructure solutions for enterprise.

Monitoring Use Case: IBM AIX helps to collect the metric values with respect to time and alerts your team to act immediately in case of any threshold breach or unexpected metric behavior observed based on configurations. In a way it helps you with smooth functioning of business with minimal or zero downtime in case of any infrastructure related issues occurring.

Pre-requisites

• OpsRamp Classic Gateway 10.0 and above.
• Credential Set: root users & non-root users member of system user group.
• To proceed, please ensure that the Adapter Integrations add-on is enabled in your client configuration. Once enabled, navigate to Setup > Integrations > Adapter to access the IBM AIX integration.

Install the integration

1. From All Clients, select a client.
2. Go to Setup > Integrations > Integrations.
3. From Available Integrations, select Adapter > IBM AIX Server.

   

4. From Install IBM AIX Server Integration,enter:

5. Click Install.
   The IBM-AIX-SERVER INTEGRATION page displays the installed integration in the CONFIGURATION section.

   

Configure the integration

1. From CONFIGURATION, click +Add.
2. From the Create Adapter Configuration page, enter:
   • Name: Configuration name.
   • IP Address/Host Name: IP address or host name of the target.
   • Additional Configurations: Add additional configuration details, such as file system, process, and so on. The Log File Configuration is part of the additional configuration, configure the values for below fields as per your log file monitoring use case:
     • Name
     • File Name
     • Rotated File Name
     • Expression
     • Check Type
     • Threshold
     • Severity
   • Notification Alerts: Select TRUE or FALSE.
     Notes:
     • By default False is selected.
     • If you select TRUE, application will handle Critical/Recovery failure alert notifications for Connectivity, Authentication Exceptions.
3. From the Credentials section, select Custom and enter the target device Username and Password.
4. In the Resource Types & Metrics section, select the metrics you want and configure for availability and alert conditions.
5. The Resource Types & Metrics section automatically displays the target device resource type such as VoIP.
6. Use Import to read in metrics and Export to save metrics locally.
7. (Optional) From the Discovery Schedule section, select the checkbox to add a Recurrence Pattern. Choose one of the following intervals:
   • Minutes
   • Hourly
   • Daily
   • Weekly
   • Monthly
8. From the Monitoring Schedule section, configure how frequently the monitoring action should trigger.
9. Click Save.

After saving the configuration, the resources are discovered and monitoring is done as specified in the configuration profile.

The configuration is saved and displayed on the page.

View the IBM AIX details

The IBM AIX integration is displayed in the Infrastructure > Resources > Server.

Supported metric

Risks, Limitations & Assumptions

• Currently we do not have monitoring support for below:
  • Hardware metrics
  • Programmable Resource Monitoring
  • Processes (We provided one metric for each process RunningStatus. i.e, ibmaix_server_process_RunningStatus)
• For log monitoring, we expect below json payload as input.
  • “Name” can be any string used to identify individual log configuration.
  • “File Name” is a combination of folder path and file name. Folder path should contain the exact path for the file as prefix. File name can be any valid string or regular expression. In case of file not found with specified file name, alert will be generated with the severity specified by the user.
    Example 1: /var/adm/ras/Age.?t.log Matches: Agent.log, Ageat.log ,.
• “Rotated File Name” is similar to filename field but specifying the rotated file. This field is optional.
• “Expression” can be any valid string or regular expression used to specify the search string. It is a mandatory field
• “Check Type” can be either “exists” or “not exists”(case insensitive). It is a mandatory field.
• “Threshold” can be any valid integer. Alert will be generated in case a specified threshold breach happens.
• “Severity” used to specify the alert type to be created in case of expression found. Possible values are CRITICAL,WARNING,INFO and OK (case insensitive) Log File configuration

  [
    {
    "Name":"",
    "File Name":"",
    "Rotated File Name":"",
    "Expression":"",
    "Check Type":"",
    "Threshold":"",
    "Severity":""
    }
  ]

• We do not process logs for the first request, since it leads to performance issues due to huge data. We will consider the latest logs ( logs generated between first and second polls) from the second request and process accordingly.
• No recovery alerts are generated for expression related alerts. we will get recovery only for file not found alerts.
• Component level threshold configuration is not possible.
• Resource level metric threshold customization and frequency setting are not possible.
• Usability issues in application configuration page while adding/editing.
• Optional configuration parameters cannot be defined.
• Application upgrade is a manual process without version change.
• We do not process logs of size greater than 1GB.
• The availability is shown unknown for few resources even if it is enabled on the respective resource metrics. This is because of the presence of multiple native type resources under the same resource type.