Free performance monitoring and capacity planning for IBM Power™ platform

Custom Groups

Custom group example
Custom groups feature allows you group selected lpars or pools from different servers into one aggregated graph.
Functionality is similar to historical reports, however here you can preconfigure it so you will get required daily-yearly graphs in 2 or 3 clicks


This might be found useful especially for grouping nodes of a active/active cluster to see on one page total CPU utilization per all its nodes
Also for active/passive cluster it might be useful, as you get total CPU utilization all nodes of the cluster (active and passives) no matter which one is actually active.
There can be found many other examples where possibility to group CPU pools or lpars from different servers can be useful.

How to start?
  • Create configuration file
    (upgrade process creates configuration file automatically, so you might skip this)
    $ cd /home/lpar2rrd/dev
    $ ./scripts/update_cfg_custom-groups.sh
    it creates this configuration file: etc/custom_groups.cfg
  • edit ./etc/custom_groups.cfg and assign lpars or pools to groups
  • when you want to refresh list of servers/pools/lpars within custom_groups.cfg then just run again:
    $ ./scripts/update_cfg_custom-groups.sh
  • Web will be updated with new configuration after next schedulled LPAR2RRD run, NOT directly after changing the config file!

You can try this functionality on LPAR2RRD live demo

Note that free LPAR2RRD version (3.20) has actually limitation of maximum 4 lpars or pools in one custom group. This might be changed in future versions.

Configuration example
Bellow you can see 3 servers p710, p595-fake, p795-fake. There is used following grouping
  • CPU pools highend: Aggregated graph of 2 CPU pools from servers p595-fake and p795-fake
  • All develop pools: aggregated of graph all CPU pools named "demo" from all servers started on "p" letter
  • lpars_rest: aggregated graph of 9 different lpars from 3 servers
  • All NIMs: aggregated graph of 3 lpars named "nim" from 3 different servers 

# [POOL|LPAR]:server:[lpar_name|pool_name]:your_group_name

POOL:p595-fake:all_pools:CPU pools highend
POOL:p.*:develop:All develop pools
LPAR:p595-fake:aix1:lpars_rest
LPAR:p595-fake:aix3:lpars_rest
LPAR:p595-fake:aix4:lpars_rest
LPAR:p595-fake:nim:All NIMs
LPAR:p710:aix1:lpars_rest
LPAR:p710:aix3:lpars_rest
LPAR:p710:aix4:lpars_rest
LPAR:p710:nim:All NIMs
POOL:p795-fake:all_pools:CPU pools highend
LPAR:p795-fake:aix1:lpars_rest
LPAR:p795-fake:aix3:lpars_rest
LPAR:p795-fake:aix4:lpars_rest
LPAR:p795-fake:nim:All NIMs

There is no restriction for "custom groups" names.
If you need to update the config file about new servers/pools/lpars then simply run this script
$ ./scripts/update_cfg_custom-groups.sh
It keeps actual setup and appends here newly found servers/pools/lpars

You can use wild cards (regular expressions) in server name and pool/lpar name
Examples 
POOL:.*:.*:pool-all   --> group pool-all will contain all pools from all servers
LPAR:.*:.*:lpar-all   --> group lpar-all will contain all lpars from all servers
LPAR:p[6,7].*:vio.*:vio-p67  --> group vio-p67 will contain lpars started vio* 
			         from servers started with p6 or p7 string


Each lpar or CPU pool can be used in as many custom groups as you want. Just duplicate the entry and place different custom group name like here: 
LPAR:p710:nim:All NIMs
LPAR:p710:nim:another NIM group
LPAR:p710:nim:3rd group for nim


Known issues
  • Bug comming with 3.30 - 3.33: new lpars and pool names have suffix .rrm or .rrh in custom_groups.cfg. Fix: 
    $ cd $LPAR2RRD_HOME$
$ ed etc/custom_groups.cfg << EOF
g/\.rrm/s/\.rrm//
g/\.rrh/s/\.rrh//
w
q
EOF