Hello,

My field is operations monitoring and this is the first time I am looking into server monitoring, so apologies if I ask stupid questions.

I would like to know if it is possible to integrate nmon with BMC patrol, i.e. feeding metrics/events from nmon into BMC patrol?

Thanks in advance.

Dont thinks so

But then Y would you want to do that ?

To have every monitoring information consolidated and centralised in one place?

As far as i know (and i don't know it exactly because i try to avoid tools like BMC) Patrol brings its own agents for this purpose. I wonder why you would want to use NMON instead, because basically there are interfaces in the system which can be utilized by everybody. Its like counters, which you can query to get the data. NMON does this (and it does it quite well, no doubt about it) but an agent provided by Patrol probably does exactly the same, so i wonder why you would want to use a foreign tool (foreign to Patrol) to achieve the same as the tool already provided by Patrol.

Probably you could write your own agent, which utilized the output file of a running NMON started in "daemon-mode" (see the documentation for NMON) and reports back to the Patrol software. But again: why do it this rather complicated way?

I hope this helps.

bakunin

Thanks bakunin,

Basically the support team just rolled out BMC and still uses Nmon as they prefer it.
As our initiative is to bring an end to end view of monitoring and alerting for the whole of the architecture (not just UNIX servers), we would like the team to use a single system rather than duplicated tools.
Since the support team seems to say that Nmon is more granular than BMC, I wondered if there was any way to hook Nmon onto BMC, but this does not seem to be a straight-forward job from what you are saying.

Not being an expert in BMC or Nmon, I can only trust what the support guys tell me. However my feeling is that they are resistant to change and want to stick with Nmon because they know it better.

I would be interested to get an outsider's view on the differences between BMC and Nmon in terms of monitoring the following metrics: CPU Utilisation; Memory Free; File System Percent Utilised; File System Space Utilised; Pages Paged In; Network Interfaces Bandwidth Utilisation.

Thanks
F.

Basically BMC and NMON do the same thing. However as BMC professes to be Platform Agnostic it is not as useful as NMON for tracking down performance problems. BMC also doesn't seem to understand the consequencies of Dynamic LPARing.

I'll be honest, that most AIX locations I've seem - whether or not there is end to end monitoring by BMC Patrol or something else, the local sys admins maintain an NMON trace of the system as well anyway, as they eitehr don't have the access to BMC data when they need it - or else they don't understand it.

Also Memory Managemen Monitoring on an AIX box is always interesting as Memory is allowed to fill up on AIX and is therefore almost always 100% full. Only tools that can Monitor the vmstats can actually see what the memory is doing.

This was very useful. Thanks