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Monitoring metrics for IBM Power Virtual Server

Monitoring metrics for IBM Power Virtual Server

IBM Power Virtual Server in IBM data center

You can monitor platform metrics from resources in your IBM® Power® Virtual Server workspace by enabling IBM Cloud® Monitoring for basic platform metrics or by installing the Cloud Monitoring agent for Linux operating systems. The Linux based agent can fetch over 100 infrastructure metrics.

IBM Cloud Monitoring is an enterprise-grade monitoring service that is used for application visibility, alerting, and troubleshooting. IBM Cloud Monitoring powered by Sysdig is used by enterprise development and IT teams that build, ship, and run business-critical applications at scale.

Installing the Monitoring agent for Linux VMs

You must provision the IBM Cloud® Monitoring service instance in the IBM Cloud. Then, you can deploy the Monitoring agent on your Linux hosts in a Power Virtual Server workspace to collect the data and metrics from the active VMs.

The Monitoring can collect over 100 metrics that includes additional CPU, memory, file, file system, and network data points. The metrics that are collected from the VMs are routed to the Sysdig backend and then displayed on the Cloud Monitoring dashboards for the selected account. You can configure the metrics to be monitored in each environment. For more information about deploying, updating, and troubleshooting the agent, see Managing the IBM Cloud Monitoring Linux agent on a PowerVS workspace. For more information about configuring your environment for metrics, see Monitoring Linux on a PowerVS workspace.

By default, the Linux based agent collects core infrastructure and network time series metrics. You can use the collected metrics to monitor the host. For more information about a list of collected metrics, see Metrics Available for non-orchestrated environments.

For more information about basic metrics, see Platform metrics overview.

Platform metrics overview

You can view platform metrics for Power Virtual Server after you create an IBM Cloud Monitoring instance in the same region that is enabled for platform monitoring. For more information, see Enabling platform metrics.

Before you create an IBM Cloud Monitoring instance on your platform, consider the following points:

  • You can configure only one instance of the IBM Cloud Monitoring service per region on your platform.
  • To monitor platform metrics, check that the IBM Cloud Monitoring instance is provisioned in the same region where the Power Virtual Server instance is provisioned.
  • Platform metrics are collected automatically and are available for monitoring through the IBM Cloud Monitoring-enabled instance.

Creating an IBM Cloud Monitoring instance

Create an IBM Cloud Monitoring instance and enable the platform metrics to capture various performance metrics.

To create an IBM Cloud Monitoring instance, complete the following steps:

To monitor platform metrics, select the region where your Power Virtual Server workspace is provisioned.

  1. Log in to IBM Cloud console.
  2. Search for IBM Cloud Monitoring and select it.
  3. Select your location and enter your custom values for Service name field and other fields.
  4. Select the Enable indicator for IBM platform metrics.
  5. Select the license agreements indicator and click Create.

You can also create the IBM Cloud monitoring instance from the Integration (Optional) section when you create a workspace, if no IBM Cloud Monitoring instance is already created for that region.

Viewing metrics

To view the metrics dashboards, access the user interface of the IBM Cloud Monitoring in the following ways:

To view metrics in your dashboard, you must enable the platform metrics of the IBM Cloud Monitoring instance.

Accessing metrics from Power Virtual Server workspace

From the left navigation menu of the Power Virtual Server user interface, complete the following steps:

  1. Click workspaces.
  2. Select the workspace for which a monitoring instance is available.
  3. From the workspace details page, click Launch monitoring. The IBM Cloud Monitoring dashboard opens.
  4. Click Dashboards > Dashboard Library > IBM and select your dashboard to view.

Accessing metrics from the Observability page.

To access the dashboard, complete the following steps:

  1. Log in to IBM Cloud console.
  2. Expand the left navigation window.
  3. Click Resource list.
  4. Click Observability > Monitoring.
  5. Click the instance.
  6. Click Open dashboard. The IBM Cloud Monitoring dashboard opens.
  7. Click Dashboards > Dashboard Library > IBM and select your dashboard to view.

Power Virtual Server metrics dictionary

CPU utilization

The CPU utilization of a Power Virtual Server instance in percentage.

Table 1: CPU utilization metrics of a VM
Metadata Description
Metric Name ibm_power_iaas_pvm_instance_cpu_util
Metric Type gauge
Value Type percent
Segment by ibm_service_instance, ibm_resource

Memory utilization

The memory utilization of a Power Virtual Server instance in percentage.

Table 2: Memory utilization metrics of a VM
Metadata Description
Metric Name ibm_power_iaas_pvm_instance_mem_util
Metric Type gauge
Value Type percent
Segment by ibm_service_instance, ibm_resource

Incoming network bytes

The incoming bytes of a Power Virtual Server instance per network interface (or per MAC address).

Table 3: Incoming byte metrics of a VM per network interface
Metadata Description
Metric Name ibm_power_iaas_pvm_instance_network_incoming_bytes
Metric Type counter
Value Type byte
Segment by ibm_service_instance, ibm_resource, ibm_power_iaas_pvm_instance_network_mac_address

Outgoing network bytes

The outgoing bytes of a Power Virtual Server instance per network interface.

Table 4: Outgoing byte metrics of a VM per network interface
Metadata Description
Metric Name ibm_power_iaas_pvm_instance_network_outgoing_bytes
Metric Type counter
Value Type byte
Segment by ibm_service_instance, ibm_resource, ibm_power_iaas_pvm_instance_network_mac_address

Disk read bytes

The total disk read bytes at Power Virtual Server instance level.

Table 5: Total disk read bytes metrics at a VM
Metadata Description
Metric Name ibm_power_iaas_pvm_instance_disk_read_bytes
Metric Type counter
Value Type byte
Segment by ibm_service_instance, ibm_resource

Disk write bytes

The total disks write bytes at Power Virtual Server instance level.

Table 6: Total disk write bytes metrics at a VM
Metadata Description
Metric Name ibm_power_iaas_pvm_instance_disk_write_bytes
Metric Type counter
Value Type byte
Segment by ibm_service_instance, ibm_resource

Attributes for segmentation

See the global and additional attributes that are available for segmentation.

Global attributes

The following global attributes are available for segmenting all the metrics that are listed in the metrics dictionary:

Table 7: Global segmentation attributes
Metric label name Metric description Valid values
ibm_ctype Type of Cloud public.
ibm_location Location of the monitored resource All the supported data center such as WDC06
ibm_resource_group_name Resource group that is associated to the service instance. All the resource groups that are available in your account
ibm_scope The extent of the data samples that are considered. IBM Cloud account ID
ibm_service_name Name of the service that generates this metric. power-iaas

Additional attributes

The following additional attributes are available for segmenting all the metrics that are listed in the metrics dictionary:

Table 8: Additional segmentation attributes
Metric label name Metric description Valid values
ibm_service_instance The workspace ID Power System Power Virtual Server workspace ID
ibm_service_instance_name The workspace name Defined name of the workspace
ibm_resource_type The type of Power Virtual Server resource for which metric is available "pvm-instance"
ibm_resource ID of a resource "pvm-instance" ID
ibm_resource_name Name of the resource The name of the Power Virtual Server instance
ibm_power_iaas_pvm_instance_network_mac_address The MAC address of the network interface that is attached to the Power Virtual Server instance Valid mac address

IBM Cloud monitoring limitations

IBM Cloud Monitoring has the following limitations:

  • The Ipv6 interface usage metrics of a Power Virtual Server instance are for internal management network. Additionally, these metrics are available even though you did not configure it.
  • When the memory utilization cannot be determined due to various reasons such as communication problem with the Power Virtual Server instance, the memory utilizations can show 100%.
  • The memory utilization is zero if the Power Virtual Server instance is in a shut-off state.
  • Metrics are available for Power Virtual Server instance that are deleted. Based on the IBM Cloud Monitoring retention policy, you can see the historical platform metrics of deleted instance. For more information, see Sysdig documentation on retention limit.
  • Metrics of Power Virtual Server instances are not available if the instance was never initialized before, error in the instance, or issue with the host.

Additional information