Advanced Interactive eXecutive popularly known as AIX is one amongst the series of proprietary Unix operating systems that have been developed and sold by IBM for its several computer platforms. It is based on UNIX System V with 4.3BSD-compatible extensions and is one amongst the four commercial operating systems that have been certified to The Open Group’s UNIX 03 standard. AIX was originally released for the IBM 6150 RISC workstation, though it has been seen supporting a wide variety of hardware platforms that include PS/2 personal computers, IBM RS/6000 series, System/370 mainframes, IBM System i, Power and Power PC based systems and the Apple Network Server.
Need to monitor AIX
AIX servers and the applications hosted by them are critical and ensuring the effective business operations on them is a real challenge. If the server performance is affected in any way, it may result in loss of productivity, may frustrate the users and may also increase the support cost for the enterprises. Let’s sample this. A Logical partitioning technology is being used to host multiple virtual machines on the same server, as is the case usually. Now if the AIX server either goes down or slows down, all the logical partitions may either fail or slow down bringing down all the business that may be worth so many millions or billions. These things increase the need to monitor AIX servers and to manage its working.
The AIX server may slow down either due to hardware problem, a malfunctioning application running on the server, server not being sized correctly to handle the workload that it was supposed to or may be due to a bottleneck (CPU, or memory, or disk, or network) on the server. If the AIX server is monitored regularly, the administrator would be able to find the exact cause of server failure and eliminate or correct it at proper time.
Parameters for Effective Monitoring of AIX
In order to effectively monitor the AIX servers, the administrators need to consider a number of parameters like:
• They should have access to metrics from every layer of the server.
• They should be able to compare the performance across each layer to correct the performance bottleneck.
• They should be able to determine in-depth application performance. Let us take an example of a Web Sphere application that is running on AIX. It may take up all of the CPU resources of the server and slow down the performance seen by the other applications running on the server. In order to diagnose and fix this problem, it is Important to know why the Web Sphere application is taking up CPU, that is, which thread, which method or which line of code is responsible for the CPU usage.
Guide to Monitor AIX
Looking into the details of the requirement to monitor AIX and its effective management, we can conclude that it’s not an easy task. There has to be something that would help the administrators or the IT staffs to simplify the art to manage AIX. Halcyon Software provides a free guide to monitor this system. It explains the important aspects of AIX systems that should be monitored and the need to monitor them. It not only helps the system administrators to adopt an appropriate monitoring solution but also guides them to use pre-configured, adaptable templates to monitor and manage the AIX environments. In scenarios like company mergers and acquisitions, sometimes AIX systems become an important part of the infrastructure and require monitoring and management by the technical people who have little prior knowledge about it. This guide plays an important role in helping them to quickly adapt to the user interface and to the unusual commands if they are not familiar with UNIX environment.
Importance of this guide
• Provide information on text based commands
• Shows how to use advanced monitoring and scheduling tools
• It informs how to send alerts to designated IT staff
• It informs how to provide effective escalation procedures through a centralized Enterprise Console
• It also informs how to manage and view alerts on a mobile app using smart phones and tablets
