Monitoring system status and health

IBM® Flex System Manager provides a set of tools that you can use to monitor and manage the status and health of resources in your environment from a single interface.

About this task

Note: The Chassis Manager view in the management software web interface is the primary interface for selecting managed resources and performing management tasks on those resources. However, some of the procedures in this section include steps that instruct you to use the navigation area, which is hidden by default in the web interface.

The navigation area provides links to tasks and task categories such as Resource Explorer, Inventory, and Health Summary. To open the navigation area, click the tab with the arrow icon on the left side of the screen.

System status and health
IBM Flex System Manager automatically retrieves and displays the status of systems that have been discovered. You can display this information using one of the System Status and Health tasks, by navigating to a specific resource in IBM Flex System Manager, or by using the command-line interface.
Viewing the status manager summary
You can view a summary of the current activity that is associated with status, including the status of the systems in your environment, the number of recordings and thresholds, and detailed status. The information on the summary page refreshes automatically when there are any changes.
Viewing the performance summary
Use the Performance Summary task to examine performance information selected from available monitors for the resources that you specify.
Using the Health Summary task to view the status of your environment
The Health Summary task displays several resource-monitoring tools on a single page. Together, these tools provide a single, consolidated interface with which you can quickly view the status of important areas of your environment, monitor critical resources, and view the contents of user-defined health summary groups.
Using Resource Explorer to view the status of a specific resource
Use Resource Explorer when you want to view the status of only one resource and you know exactly which resource it is. Using the Resource Explorer task, you can navigate to a specific resource and drill down to view detailed status information.
Scenarios: Using custom monitor views, thresholds, and event automation plans
These example scenarios illustrate ways to use monitors, thresholds, and event automation plans to report when important or critical disk drive conditions occur. Each scenario creates a custom a monitor view, activates thresholds for the monitors in the view, and uses the view and thresholds in an event automation plan. When reported by the automation plan, the results from each example indicate the affected disk drives by the letter name given to them on the system.
Monitors and thresholds
Monitors provide the means to retrieve and visually observe real-time changes in system resources. Activating thresholds on monitors offers a way to trigger events or report problems when the monitored resource exceeds the threshold. IBM Flex System Manager includes monitor views, which are groups of monitors that belong to a specific category. Examples of monitor views are AIX® monitors and SNMP monitors. Create custom monitor views that contain collections of monitors that you find useful. Combine monitors, thresholds, and automation plans to automate troubleshooting or corrective actions in response to reported warnings or critical situations.
Monitor views
Use the Monitors task to monitor critical system resources on your managed systems. IBM Flex System Manager arranges available monitors in groups called monitor views. Each view represents a list of the most commonly available monitors in a category, for example, monitors that are supported by AIX. Use existing monitor views or create your own views that contain the selections of individual monitors that you find useful.
Managing monitors
The Monitors task provides the tools that you need to retrieve real-time status and quantitative data for specific properties and attributes of resources in your environment. You can also set thresholds for the monitors, graph the data that monitors retrieve, and drill down to quickly view the status of resources for each system and the name of the monitor so that you can view its properties.
Managing thresholds
The Thresholds task offers a consolidated view of all the thresholds that you have created to monitor the dynamic properties of your resource. This task saves you from searching for them all in the Monitors task.
Managing status set entries
The status set entries that are reported by resources that are managed by IBM Flex System Manager help to indicate the overall health of your environment. By managing and monitoring status set entries, which include problems and compliance issues, you can help prevent undetected failures that cause network interruptions and data loss.
Managing the event log
An event is an occurrence of significance to a task or resource. Examples of events include operation completion, hardware component failure, or a processor threshold being exceeded. The Event Log task displays all events that the management server receives from any resource for which you can view events.
Viewing SNMP device attributes
You can use the SNMP Browser task to view the attributes of SNMP devices, for example, hubs, routers, or other management devices that are compliant with SNMP. You can use the SNMP Browser for management based on SNMP, troubleshooting, or monitoring the performance of SNMP devices.
Managing MIB files
You can import, remove, and compile Management Information Base (MIB) files for SNMP-compliant resources.
Managing process monitors
You can use process monitors to generate events when an application process starts, stops, or fails to start.
Recording resource-monitor statistics
You can view statistics about critical system resources, such as processor, disk, and memory by recording resource-monitor statistics. Record resource-monitor statistics for an individual managed system, multiple systems specified by IP addresses or host names, or system groups by using the smcli resource-monitor recording commands.