**HMCi** is a utility that collects metrics from one or more *IBM Power Hardware Management Consoles (HMC)*, without the need to install agents on logical partitions / virtual machines running on the IBM Power systems. The metric data is processed and saved into an InfluxDB time-series database. Grafana is used to visualize the metrics from InfluxDB through provided dashboards, or your own customized dashboards.
This software is free to use and is licensed under the [Apache 2.0 License](https://bitbucket.org/mnellemann/syslogd/src/master/LICENSE), but is not supported or endorsed by International Business Machines (IBM). There is an optional [companion agent](https://bitbucket.org/mnellemann/sysmon/), which provides more metrics from within AIX and Linux.
If you do not enable *Performance Monitoring Data Collection for Managed Servers*, you will see errors such as *Unexpected response: 403*. Use the HMCi debug option to get more details about what is going on.
Install InfluxDB (v. **1.8.x** or **1.9.x** for best compatibility with Grafana) on a host which is network accessible by the HMCi utility (the default InfluxDB port is 8086). You can install Grafana on the same server or any server which are able to connect to the InfluxDB database. The Grafana installation needs to be accessible from your browser (default on port 3000). The default settings for both InfluxDB and Grafana will work fine as a start.
- You can download [Grafana ppc64le](https://www.power-devops.com/grafana) and [InfluxDB ppc64le](https://www.power-devops.com/influxdb) packages for most Linux distributions and AIX on the [Power DevOps](https://www.power-devops.com/) site.
- Binaries for amd64/x86 are available from the [Grafana website](https://grafana.com/grafana/download) and [InfluxDB website](https://portal.influxdata.com/downloads/) and most likely directly from your Linux distributions repositories.
CREATE DATABASE "hmci" WITH DURATION 365d REPLICATION 1;
```
See the [Influx documentation](https://docs.influxdata.com/influxdb/v1.8/query_language/manage-database/#create-database) for more information on duration and replication.
Install *HMCi* on a host, which can connect to the Power HMC (on port 12443), and is also allowed to connect to the InfluxDB service. This *can be* the same LPAR/VM as used for the InfluxDB installation.
- On RPM based systems: **sudo rpm -i hmci-x.y.z-n.noarch.rpm**
- On DEB based systems: **sudo dpkg -i hmci_x.y.z-n_all.deb**
- Copy the **/opt/hmci/doc/hmci.toml** configuration example into **/etc/hmci.toml** and edit the configuration to suit your environment. The location of the configuration file can be changed with the *--conf* option.
- Run the **/opt/hmci/bin/hmci** program in a shell, as a @reboot cron task or configure as a proper service - there are instructions in the *doc/readme-service.md* file.
From version 1.2 *HMCi* is made compatible with the similar [nextract Plus](https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/nextract-plus-hmc-rest-api-performance-statistics) tool from Nigel Griffiths. This means that the Grafana [dashboards](https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/13819) made by Nigel are compatible with *HMCi* and the other way around.
I have not been able to test and verify all types of metric data. If you encounter any missing or wrong data, please contact me, so I can try to fix it. It is possible to run **hmci** with *-d -d* to log JSON data received by the HCM, which can help me implement missing data.
If you rename a partition, the metrics in InfluxDB will still be available by the old name, and new metrics will be available by the new name of the partition. There is no easy way to migrate the old data, but you can delete it easily: