HMC Insights

HMCi is a utility that collects metrics from one or more IBM Power HMC systems. The metric data is processed and saved into an InfluxDB time-series database. Grafana can be used to visualize the metrics from InfluxDB.

Metrics includes:

• Managed Systems - the physical Power servers
• Logical Partitions - the virtualized servers running AIX, Linux and IBM-i (AS/400)
• Virtual I/O Servers - the i/o partition(s) taking care of network and storage
• Energy - power consumption and temperatures

Installation and Setup

HMC Setup Instructions

• Login to your HMC
• Navigate to Users and Security
• Create a new read-only hmci user, which will be used to connect to the REST API.
• Click Manage User Profiles and Access, edit the newly created hmci user and click User Properties:
  • Enable Allow remote access via the web
  • Set Session timeout in minutes to 0
• Navigate to HMC Mangement and Console Settings
• Click Change Performance Monitoring Settings:
  • Enable Performance Monitoring Data Collection for Managed Servers: All On
  • Set Performance Data Storage to 1 day or more

InfluxDB and Grafana Setup Instructions

Install InfluxDB on an LPAR or other server, 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. The default settings for both InfluxDB and Grafana will work fine as a start.

• You can download Grafana ppc64le and InfluxDB ppc64le packages for most Linux distributions and AIX on the Power DevOps site.
• Binaries for amd64/x86 are available from the Grafana website and InfluxDB website and most likely directly from your Linux distributions repositories.

HMCi Installation Instructions

• Ensure you have correct date/time and NTPd running to keep it accurate!
• The only requirement for hmci is the Java runtime, version 8 (or later)
• Install HMCi from downloads (rpm, deb or jar) or build from source
• Copy the 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 a flag when running hmci.
• Run the bin/hmci program in a shell, as a @reboot cron task or setup a proper service :)
• When started, hmci will try to create the InfluxDB database named hmci, if not found.
• Configure Grafana to communicate with your InfluxDB and import dashboards from the doc/ folder into Grafana.

Grafana Screenshots

Below are screenshots of the provided Grafana dashboards (found in the doc/ folder), which can be used as a starting point.

• hmci-resources.png
• hmci-energy.png
• hmci-vois.png
• hmci-lpars

Known problems

Naming collision

You can't have partitions on different HMC's with the same name, as these cannot be distinguished when metrics are written to InfluxDB (which uses the name as key).

Renaming partitions

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:

DELETE WHERE partition = 'lpar-name';

Notes

Start InfluxDB and Grafana at boot on RedHat 7+

systemctl enable influxdb
systemctl start influxdb

systemctl enable grafana-server
systemctl start grafana-server

InfluxDB Retention Policy

Per default the hmci influx database has no retention policy, so data will be kept forever. It is recommended to set a retention policy, which is shown below.

Examples for changing the default InfluxDB retention policy for the hmci database:

 ALTER RETENTION POLICY "autogen" ON "hmci" DURATION 156w
 ALTER RETENTION POLICY "autogen" ON "hmci" DURATION 90d

Development Information

You need Java (JDK) version 8 or later to build hmci.

Build & Test

Use the gradle build tool, which will download all required dependencies:

./gradlew clean build

Local Testing

InfluxDB container

Start the InfluxDB container:

docker run --name=influxdb --rm -d -p 8086:8086 influxdb

To execute the Influx client from within the container:

docker exec -it influxdb influx

Grafana container

Start the Grafana container, linking it to the InfluxDB container:

docker run --name grafana --link influxdb:influxdb --rm -d -p 3000:3000 grafana/grafana:7.1.3

Setup Grafana to connect to the InfluxDB container by defining a new datasource on URL http://influxdb:8086 named hmci.

The hmci database must be created beforehand, which can be done by running the hmci tool first.

Grafana dashboards can be imported from the doc/ folder.