Best Tools+Commands to monitor HP Itanuiem Servers

[John Ferro]

Good Morning,

I am working as Junior System Administrator, my responsbility is to monitor the System (OS level+HW). What is the best tools or command i should use to monitor my system,and prepare health check report?

Thanks in advance.

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

Shalom Faisal,

Most systems admins, junior or otherwise use cron scripting to monitor their systems. Later in this post will be a link to hundreds of good scripts.

To start:
sam
Set up EMS to monitor your system with email alerts. This will give you advance warning on hardware failures.

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=178514

SEP

[Torsten.]

Hi,

the combination of diagnostics including EMS and ISEE will do a self monitoring and inform you in case of (HW) trouble, see

http://h20219.www2.hp.com/services/cache/28626-0-0-225-121.html

[Jaime Bolanos Rojas.]

Faisal,

I am not that good at scripting and everytime that I see some I kinda panic, but I like the easy way, EMS, STM, ISEE and SIM are the tools you want to get familiar with.

Regards,

Jaime.

[Alex Georgiev]

At the very least you are going to need a script that runs from cron and monitors disk space! There have been several here on this forums, but for some reason I can't find the posts right now.

After you get that squared away, start learning the tools that other people have already mentioned. EMS monitors are, perhaps, the most important. Run the script /etc/opt/resmon/lbin/monconfig to configure EMS alerts (it's very easy!).

A couple of other things you should be doing:

It's always a good idea to check root's email once in a while... you can just redirect it with a .forward file to your corporate email server. The syntax for the .forward file is the same as the syntax for the Sendmail aliases file (man 5 aliases)... Or just search the forums.

Make sure you monitor the syslog file... there are scripts for that, too. If you don't want anything complicated you can just grep for 'vmunix' through the syslog file every hour or two. That should give you the critical stuff you need to know about.

Finally, a trick I use is to make a backup copy of all important system files like /etc/passwd & /etc/hosts. I run a script every hour that does a diff between my backup copy and the actual system file. If there is a difference, the script emails me & makes a new copy of the file. That way I know that someone made a change on the system within the last hour... I usually keep 2 to 3 copies of each file. That way I can go back to a previous copy, if needed.

[Bob E Campbell]

While you are loading up those cron jobs be sure to add in Software Assistant. SWA will report Security Bulletins and HP-UX patch issues that should be reviewed on a periodic basis.

For more information and the free download head to https://hp.com/go/swa.

Bob

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Before you do too much, check out this product:

http://www.openview.hp.com/products/ovoux/index.html

This is really the tool of choice because it allows you to monitor UNIX boxes, Windows boxes, the Network, and just about anything else of interest. It really transforms you from the checking one box at a time to checking all of your boxes all the time. All the "events" (performance alarms, hardware problems, security issues) are delivered to a browser. OV/O can send Windows problems to the Windows browser and UNIX problems to the UNIX browser or any other combination you like.

Automatic escalation and notification is easy as well. Imagine that you have a file system filling up. OV/O can even expand an LVOL and grow a filesystem automatically without waking you up in the middle of the night.

Now, the learning curve for this is steep (classes are available) but if you want to make the transition from Jr. Administrator to Sr. Administrator quickly then take this approach and Openview experience is a rather good thing to have on your resume.