HMC Insights

HMCi is a utility that collects metrics from one or more IBM Power HMC, without the need to install any agents. The metric data is processed and saved into an InfluxDB time-series database. Grafana can be used to visualize the metrics from InfluxDB. This software is free to use and is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License, but is not supported or endorsed by International Business Machines (IBM). There is an optional companion agent application, which provides more metrics from within AIX and Linux.

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) virtualizing network and storage
• Energy - power consumption and temperatures (needs to be enabled and is not available for P7, E870, E880 and E980)

Installation and Setup

There are few steps in the installation.

1. Preparations on the Hardware Management Console (HMC)
2. Installation of InfluxDB and Grafana software on a Linux LPAR or VM
3. Installation and configuration of the HMCi software
4. Configure Grafana and import example dashboards

1 - Power HMC Setup Instructions

• Login to your HMC
• Navigate to Console Settings
  • Go to Change Date and Time
    • Set correct timezone, if not done already
    • Configure one or more NTP servers, if not done already
    • Enable the NTP client, if not done already
• 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 minutes to 120
    • Set Verify timeout minutes to 15
    • Set Idle timeout minutes to 15
    • Set Minimum time in days between password changes to 0
• Navigate to HMC Management 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 preferable more

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 flag to get more details about what is going on.

2 - InfluxDB and Grafana Installation

Install InfluxDB (v. 1.8 for best compatibility with Grafana) on an LPAR or VM, 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.
• Create the empty hmci database through the influx cli command:

CREATE DATABASE "hmci" WITH DURATION 365d REPLICATION 1;

See the Influx documentation for more information on duration and replication.

3 - HMCi Installation & Configuration

Install HMCi on a host, which can connect to the Power HMC through HTTPS, and is able to connect to the InfluxDB service. This can be the same LPAR/VM as used for the InfluxDB installation.

• 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
  • 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.
• When started, hmci expects the InfluxDB database to be created by you.

4 - Grafana Configuration

• Configure Grafana to use InfluxDB as a new datasource
  • NOTE: set Min time interval to 30s or 1m depending on your HMCi refresh setting.
• Import example dashboards from the doc/ folder into Grafana as a starting point and get creative making your own cool dashboards :)

Notes

Compatibility with nextract Plus

From version 1.2 HMCi is made compatible with the similar nextract Plus tool from Nigel Griffiths. This means that the Grafana dashboards made by Nigel are compatible with HMCi.

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

Upgrading HMCi

On RPM based systems (RedHat, Suse, CentOS), download the latest hmci-x.y.z-n.noarch.rpm file and upgrade:

sudo rpm -Uvh hmci-x.y.z-n.noarch.rpm

On DEB based systems (Debian, Ubuntu and derivatives), download the latest hmci_x.y.z-n_all.deb file and upgrade:

sudo dpkg -i hmci_x.y.z-n_all.deb

Restart the HMCi service on systemd based Linux systems:

systemctl restart hmci
journalctl -f -u hmci  # to check log output

AIX Notes

To install (or upgrade) on AIX, you need to pass the --ignoreos flag to the rpm command:

rpm -Uvh --ignoreos hmci-x.y.z-n.noarch.rpm

Grafana Screenshots

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

• hmci-systems.png
• hmci-vois.png
• hmci-lpars

Known problems

Incomplete test of metrics

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.

Naming collision

You can't have partitions (or Virtual I/O Servers) on different Systems 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 lparname = 'name';

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:1.8-alpine

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.