EPV for Linux on Z provides you with a complete vision of Linux systems running as z/VM guests. EPV allows quick identification of anomalies, performance problems and abnormal resource consumptions; it is also an efficient tool for capacity planning and cost accounting.
Product components
• Exceptions: provides a complete vision of the most important hardware and software threshold violations which helps locate problems and anomalies immediately. The default thresholds fit well for most installations.
• Configuration: provides a detailed vision of the hardware and software configuration including virtual machine configuration; this information is the first mandatory step in order to control and manage your systems and in general to perform all Capacity Management activities. EPV correlates data coming from various sources and systems, producing a global vision of shared resources such as CECs, in a completely automated process. EPV audits configuration changes allowing an immediate identification of possible anomalies related to them.
• Resources: provides a complete vision of the “health” condition of the critical hardware resources, especially those shared amongst different z/VM systems as processors, memory, disks and channels. Starting from an integrated enterprise view you can navigate and analyse any saturation or performance problem. The time period and resource causing the bottleneck are highlighted using a red background so they can be very easily located.
• Workloads provides a detailed vision of your workloads, allowing a simple and guided analysis of what is going on in complex environments through drill-down capabilities. Starting from a FUNCTION view, performance and resource consumptions can be analysed drilling down to virtual machines details. Information about the top processes running inside Linux guests is also provided.
• Trends provides daily, weekly and monthly views of performance and resource consumptions at the enterprise, system and virtual machine levels. By use of these views it is possible to understand the growth of your workloads and its impact on your systems.
Access to available data
EPV for Linux on Z uses standard measures normally available in any z/VM environment and supports various sources, such as ITRM (IT Resource Management), MXG (Merrill’s eXpanded Guide) or native z/VM monitor records.
Using “de facto” standard technologies
All reports are produced in simple static HTML pages published on a server of your choice and can be accessed by your favourite “browser”. All the tables provided in the reports can be exported individually or together in a MS-Excel spread sheet.
Architecture
EPV LINUX on Z architecture is based on the following three layers:
• An interface to collect input data;
• An engine to correlate and aggregate data;
• An engine to produce HTML pages.
The EPV Performance database is based on standard SAS files, SQL relational databases or data sets in the Hadoop Distributed File System.
Requirements
EPV for Linux on Z has no pre-requisites; it’s an “out of the box” solution which integrates a light version of the EPV zParser product to interpret the needed SMF records and all the other input data required.
EPV for Linux on Z can also run on top of SAS. In this case the requirements are:
• Availability of a SAS System Base module at least on a PC;
• Availability of one of the following products: SAS ITRM, MXG.