OS Resource Utilization Monitoring

OS resource utilization is monitored by the N1 System Manager. As part of the add server feature command, with the agentip keyword, you provide credentials to access the monitored server's operating system through ssh with the agentssh keyword. See To Add the OS Monitoring Feature for additional details. This procedure is important for OS resource utilization monitoring but not for monitoring hardware health or network reachability.

Access to the operating system by this mechanism is required primarily for the Remote Command Execution feature. Access to the operating system by this mechanism is how the management features are used to retrieve data for OS resource utilization monitoring. Platform OS interface data is obtained through ssh and SNMP; all attribute data is retrieved from the server's operating system by using ssh and SNMP. Statistics related to the central processor unit (CPU) are provided, as is data related to memory, swap usage, and file systems. For the purposes of monitoring, system load data, memory usage, and swap usage data can be broken down as follows:

• System usage, including system idle times

• System load, expressed as the average number of queued processes over 1, 5, and 15 minutes

• Memory usage and memory free statistics, in megabytes and as percentages

• Physical load statistics

• Swap space used and space available, in megabytes and as percentages

• File system used and space available, as percentages

A list of these attributes is provided in Hardware Sensor Attributes.

You can filter OS resource utilization monitoring information for all servers by using the show server command:

N1-ok> show server utilization utilization

N1-ok> show server utilization unreachable

The health of an OS resource can be shown as unknown if the server is reachable but the monitoring agent cannot be contacted on SNMP port 161.

The health of an OS resource can be shown as unreachable if the server is unreachable due to, for example, being in standby mode.

See show server in Sun N1 System Manager 1.1 Command Line Reference Manual for details.

The monitoring of OS resource utilization attributes enables you to modify the default threshold values for all servers being managed by the N1 System Manager, through the creation and editing of a configuration file. See Changing Threshold Values With the Monitoring Configuration File for details.

The monitoring of OS resource utilization attributes also enables you to set specific thresholds for individual monitored servers, or for groups of monitored servers, at the command line by using the set command. See Setting Threshold Values for details.

If you are not interested in the values of some attributes, you can disable the threshold severity for monitoring of those attributes. This action prevents annoyance alarms. Example 5–4 shows you how to accomplish this disabling action.