IBM Power monitor

Hi Jacob,

I'm afraid that we do not have experience with monitoring of IBM Power Monitor we could share with you. Does one of these sensors work?

• SNMP IBM System X Logical Disk Sensor
• SNMP IBM System X Physical Disk Sensor
• SNMP IBM System X Physical Memory Sensor
• SNMP IBM System X System Health Sensor

If not, you can see if there is some kind of API you can use to gather data, or if IBM provides an SNMP MIB file, which could be integrated by using our MIB Importer Tool and create an SNMP Library Sensor afterwards.

Kind regards,
Felix Saure, Tech Support Team

Hi Felix

Thanks for your answer. I am sorry, but we can not query the Power servers in the same way as we do it regular x86 systems. They do not have an ILO or iDrac interface in the same way. They are all managed via a management server. Which can only do SNMP traps and Email.

Best regards Jacob

Hi Jacob,

If no active monitoring like SNMP or HTTPS is allowed, you can use the passive receivers:

• SNMP Trap Receiver Sensor
• IMAP Sensor - to monitor a mailbox to search for particular content, or incoming mails

Kind regards,
Felix Saure, Tech Support Team

Hi Felix

Thanks for your answer. That is true, and we are already using SNMP Traps to monitor the hardware itself. What I am looking after is the monitoring of the virtual machines running on the Power system. We have installed several Linux installations on the power systems. It is primarily the CPU utilization that is the problem. It can not remove the cores not available to the machine, like the service "https://lpar2rrd.com/" can do.

Br Jacob

Hi Jacob,

Indeed, the sensor performs a meta scan to discover all available CPUs. Are you using the SNMP or the SSH CPU sensors?

For the SNMP, you can put some manual afford in creating the sensors. Perform an SNMP Walk to get a list of all available OIDs pointing to the CPU. You can walk the OID

1.3.6.1.2.1.25.3.3.1.2.index

for that, the last digit (.index) is the identifier of the CPU then. This way, you can add an SNMP Custom (Advanced) Sensor to the device and manually add the CPUs.

Otherwise, a custom (SSH) script might be the way to go if you wan to do active monitoring.

Kind regards,
Felix Saure, Tech Support Team

Hi Felix

We are currently using SNMP. The adjustments can possibly be made yes. Just need to identify which CPUs it can use. I will work and see if they can be identified in the OS. But it still does not change the wish of feature request to support Power :)

Br Jacob

I have been talking to a technician about this. This is the output from one of our servers:*Architecture:

ppc64le
Byte Order:          Little Endian
CPU(s):              32
On-line CPU(s) list: 0-31
Thread(s) per core:  8
Core(s) per socket:  1
Socket(s):           4
NUMA node(s):        1
Model:               1.2 (pvr 004e 2102)
Model name:          POWER9 (architected), altivec supported
Hypervisor vendor:   pHyp
Virtualization type: para
L1d cache:           32K
L1i cache:           32K
NUMA node0 CPU(s):   0-31
Physical sockets:    4
Physical chips:      1
Physical cores/chip: 10

In nmon I can see that the "real" number we want to see is called "PhysicalCPUused" in nmon - that actually shows the right performance number. Can that help in any way?

br Jacob

Hello Jacob,

Then I'd recommend to write your own script to extract the desired metric and to forward it to PRTG. This can be either actively via the SSH Script Advanced Sensor or by pushing the script's results to PRTG using the HTTP Push Data Advanced Sensor.

We have a couple of sample scripts in our PRTG Sensor Hub to get an idea about the required syntax - none with this special requirements so far.

It would also be great if you would upload the script afterwards for the community.

Kind regards,
Felix Saure, Tech Support Team

Hi Felix

Thanks for your recommendation. I have not found a command to query it yet, but if I find it, I will add it to a script. Have a nice day.

Best regards Jacob