Working with Management Central monitors

 

Management Central monitors can be used to check your system performance, your jobs and servers, your message queues, and changes to selected files.

You can specify thresholds for various metrics on these monitors, and then specify actions to be taken whenever a monitor detects that a threshold has been triggered. For example, you can run an i5/OS^® command or start a program when the threshold is triggered. For specific examples that describe how you can use these monitors, see the related concept Scenarios: Performance.

You can use a system monitor to see detailed graphs that monitor the real-time performance of multiple i5/OS operating system. In the Graph History window, you can see a graphical view of the metrics that have been collected for an extended period of time by Collection Services. You can contrast this data with the real-time data for the last hour shown in a System Monitor window.

You can monitor your jobs and servers with a job monitor. For example, you might want to monitor a job's CPU usage, job status, or job log messages. For each of those metrics, you can specify a threshold and actions to take when that threshold is triggered. For example, you could set up your monitor to send a message to the system operator whenever the CPU usage exceeds a certain threshold. In addition to the i5/OS commands, you can use the Advanced Job Scheduler Send Distribution using JS (SNDDSTJS) command to notify someone by e-mail when the threshold is exceeded, if the Advanced Job Scheduler licensed program 5722-JS1 is installed on the endpoint system.

You can create a message monitor to take action on a list of messages that are important to you. For example, when the message monitor detects CPI0953 (threshold of a disk pool is exceeded), you could specify to run a command that deletes objects that you no longer need from the disk pool. You can use a file monitor to monitor for a specified text string or for a specified size. Or, you can monitor for any modification to one or more selected files. You can select one or more files to be monitored, or you can select the History log option, which will monitor the i5/OS history log (QHST).

Integrated file system treats QSYS physical files as directories, with the physical file members actually treated as files.

You can use a B2B activity monitor to view a graph of active transactions over time, and you can run commands automatically when thresholds are triggered. You can search for and display a specific transaction as well as view a bar graph of the detailed steps of that specific transaction.

You can start any Management Central monitor, and then turn to other tasks on your server, in iSeries™ Navigator, or on your PC. You can choose to be informed by an audible or visible alarm on your PC when important thresholds are reached. The monitor will continue to run and perform any threshold commands or actions you specified. Your monitor will run until you decide to stop it. You can view all your monitors, as well as all your Management Central tasks, remotely with iSeries Navigator for Wireless.

In the Management Central properties, you can specify whether you want the central system to automatically attempt to restart your monitors on endpoint systems where they failed to start. If you select to have the system automatically attempt to restart your monitors, you may also specify how long you want the central system to keep trying to restart the monitors and how often you want the system to try during that time period. For example, if you want the system to try to restart monitors every five minutes for a period of 3 hours, you can select Automatically restart monitors on failed systems, and then specify 180 minutes for How long to attempt restart and 5 minutes for How often to attempt restart.

The steps to create and run a monitor are basically the same for whichever type of monitor you choose to run.

To view or download a PDF version of this topic, select Working with Management Central monitors (about 194 KB)

• Monitor concepts
  Monitors can display real-time performance data. Additionally, they can continually monitor your system in order to run a selected command when a specified threshold is reached. Find out how monitors work, what they can monitor, and how they can respond to a given performance situation.

• Management collection objects
  Collection Services stores data for each collection in a single collection object from which you can create as many different sets of database files as you need. This introductory topic explains the management collection object, when it is created, and how the available Collection Services settings affect these objects.

• Job monitors and Collection Services
  In order to avoid creating a negative performance impact on your system, you should understand how the different metrics in the job monitor uses Collection Services.

• Special considerations
  When working with Management Central monitors, consider these special points.

• Creating a new monitor
  Creating a new monitor is a process that begins at the New Monitor window. In iSeries Navigator, expand Management Central, expand Monitors, right-click the type of monitor you want to create (for example, Job), and then click New Monitor.

• Viewing monitor results
  When you have specified when to apply the thresholds and actions you have defined for your monitor, you are ready to view your monitor results.

• Resetting triggered threshold for a monitor
  When you are viewing the job monitor results, you can reset a triggered threshold.

• Scenarios: iSeries Navigator monitors
  Use this information to see how you can use some of the different types of monitors to look at specific aspects of your system's performance.

 

Parent topic:

Management Central