Script for Monitoring iCAP Systems (August 2010)

Issue

Sometimes a system administrator is unaware when there are problems with an iCAP system and the

problems can persist for a long time before it becomes obvious that action is required. This can result

in the following outcomes:

 Temporary Capacity (TiCAP) is consumed inadvertently, and possibly a negative TiCAP

balance results.

 Cores allocated to vPars exceed the quantity of usage rights available, resulting in one or

more vPars being unable to reboot.

 Communication problems between partitions might prevent other partitions from being able to

allocate expected resources, and/or result in inadvertent TiCAP consumption.

Whitepapers are available that describe these problems and steps to take to prevent them. You can

find them at the following locations:

 Maintaining iCAP Compliance on HP Integrity & HP 9000 Mid-range & Superdome Servers

 Practices for maintaining compliance with iCAP on Superdome 2

Solution

A sample script has been written that can be used to have a summary of the status of an iCAP system

mailed to the system administrator on a daily basis. The script is intended to be run from cron(1M).

The entire script is included below in this document. It can be used ‘as is’, or modified to suit your

specific needs. The script includes instructions for adding it to root’s crontab(1). Use of this script will

ensure that if there are problems with the iCAP system, the system administrator will be notified and

be able to correct the situation before it escalates into a critical issue.