CMC Updates - June 2018

Capacity Monitoring

Do you have a responsibility to monitor the health of systems, find which ones are heavily utilized, understand utilization patterns, and / or identify the system where the next VM can be deployed?  If so, we’re happy to introduce the new Capacity Monitoring app.

An eventual replacement for the current Performance app, Capacity Monitoring has been designed and developed to help you easily monitor capacity usage on your systems, and make informed decisions.  Much of the design was based on feedback we received on the current Performance app and how it wasn’t as straightforward to gain these utilization insights.

Capacity Monitoring provides the following features:

• Dashboard of system resource utilization across all your datacenters.
• Current resource utilization view of systems, which can be used to decide placement of new VMs.
• Options to set notification thresholds for a system and VM resources.
  • The dashboard will show the systems and VMs which have crossed the threshold. You can take appropriate actions, either by adding more resources to the VM, or moving VMs to a less loaded system.
• Visualization of system’s core usage, which helps in understanding the system’s resource utilization pattern.

In our last bulletin, we mentioned updates done in the CMC infrastructure that help us continuously deliver functions and fixes to you. As part of our continuous delivery focus, we are delivering the first stage of a new app, Capacity Monitoring, as a Beta. 

In the first stage of the app, you’ll see support for system core usage.  For more info, see our articles:

https://ibmcmc.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360005943694-Capacity-Monitoring-Performance-Systems
https://ibmcmc.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360005943654-Capacity-Monitoring-Performance-System-Details
https://ibmcmc.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360005943594-Capacity-Monitoring-Settings

We recommend the following levels of HMC for the Capacity Monitoring app:

1. HMC 860 SP3 with PTF MH01773
2. HMC 870 SP1 with PTF MH01774 (x86), MH01775 (ppc)
3. HMC 910 SP1

In the near future we will be delivering support for memory, virtual I/O, and power usage.  In addition to this, you’ll see a partition's core, memory, and virtual I/O usage, as well as Shared Processor Pool's core usage.

Other Updates

Another update we have made with this release is providing the option to import a list of systems to be blocklisted in the Cloud Connector settings of the CMC portal. Previously, this option was available only when setting up the portal on first login. With this update, along with manually adding systems to the current blocklist, you could alternatively upload a CSV file containing “Machine Type Model Serial Numbers” of the systems to be blocklisted.

Let us know your feedback on the new app and with CMC!!