HP XC System Software Administration Guide Version 4.0

7 Monitoring the System
System monitoring can identify situations before they become problems. This chapter addresses
the following topics:
• “Monitoring Tools” (page 85)
• “Monitoring Strategy” (page 86)
• “Displaying System Environment Data” (page 87)
• “Monitoring Disks” (page 88)
• “Displaying System Statistics” (page 88)
• “Logging Node Events” (page 90)
• “The collectl Utility” (page 92)
• “Using HP Graph To Display Network Bandwidth and System Use” (page 95)
• “The resmon Utility” (page 100)
• “The kdump Mechanism and the crash Utility” (page 102)
7.1 Monitoring Tools
Tools for monitoring the HP XC System Software include the following:
• Standard Linux monitoring commands:
— ps
— sar
— top
— uptime
— vmstat
— w
You can use these administrative commands from any node to determine the health of an
individual node. Information for these commands is available from their corresponding
manpages.
• Utilities developed by HP:
— The collectl utility. See “The collectl Utility” (page 92) for more information.
— The HP XC shownode metrics command, which can be issued from any node in the
HP XC system, provides the ability to monitor the status of all the nodes in the system.
These arguments to the shownode metrics command monitor the node status:
◦ shownode metrics cpus
◦ shownode metrics cputotals
◦ shownode metrics load
◦ shownode metrics mem
◦ shownode metrics paging
◦ shownode metrics sensors
◦ shownode metrics swap
For more information, see “Displaying System Statistics” (page 88) and shownode(8).
• Externally developed software:
— The Nagios Web-based utility displays a series of windows that provide system statistics.
Chapter 8 (page 105) discusses Nagios.
— Supermon is a highly scalable, high-speed cluster monitoring system. Supermon provides
all required node statistics to the Nagios subsystem. System statistics are tiered,
aggregated, and stored in the configuration and management database (CMDB)s.
7.1 Monitoring Tools 85