HP XC System Software Administration Guide Version 3.0

6. Monitoring the System
System monitoring can identify situations before they become problems. This chapter addresses the following
topics:
• Monitoring Strategy (page 61)
• Monitoring Tools (page 61)
• Displaying System Environment Data (page 71)
• Displaying System Statistics (page 72)
• Logging Node Events (page 74)
Monitoring Strategy
The HP XC system monitoring strategy is built on Open Source tools that are configured automatically to
provide a seamless integration with the HP XC system. The key open source components of the monitoring
suite consist of the following:
• the Nagios system
• the Supermon monitors
• the syslog and the syslog-ng logging systems
The syslog-ng tool provides consolidated logging across the HP XC system. The supermon tool allows
metrics to be gathered efficiently throughout the HP XC system and aggregated into the Configuration and
Management database (cmdb). Nagios provides dynamic health monitoring and reporting as well as
integration of the various monitoring services. Figure 6-1. illustrates the interaction of these tools.
Figure 6-1. System Monitoring System Monitoring
The mond and syslog daemons run on every node. The Supermon service manages requests for mond
daemons that run on a subset of nodes. The mond daemon can be configured to pass any metric data for
aggregation to the parent Supermon service. The Nagios master and other Nagios monitors run their
check_metrics plug-in periodically, which causes Supermon data collection and storage into the database.
The Root Supermon also connects to all other Supermon services and manages a subset of nodes. The
syslog daemons report events to the syslog-ng services
Other tools, such as collectl, work independently from this structure.
Monitoring Tools
The HP XC System Software includes the shownode metrics command in addition to such standard Linux
monitoring commands as the following:
• ps
• sar
Monitoring Strategy 61