nmon

Overview

nmon is a system performance monitoring tool designed by Nigel Griffiths at IBM, originally for AIX, and later ported by the same author to Linux.

nmon remains the preferred data collection daemon on AIX and is gaining traction with Linux administrators. Some of the advantages of nmon include:

Single binary, easy to install.
Console and batch mode.
Scheduled with cron.
Collects server configuration in addition to statistics.
Optional process-level statistics with customizable thresholds.
Compact data format.

On AIX, nmon is pre-installed on AIX 5.3 and 6.1 and newer versions by default. On older AIX versions 4.1.5, 4.2, 4.3, 5.1, and 5.2, nmon can be installed manually.

On Linux, nmon is released under GPL license. It can be downloaded as an executable binary or compiled from source. Supported distributions include Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, SLES, and OpenSUSE.

Axibase Time Series Database (ATSD) supports nmon file natively and can consolidate statistics from AIX and Linux systems in a single repository for long-term retention and ad-hoc analysis.

Integration Options

The database implements several methods of loading nmon files.

Manual upload provides a convenient web interface to upload nmon data files and instantly view statistics stored in the files.
Scheduled upload provides API to push nmon files from remote systems using wget, nc, or bash tcp/udp pseudo-device files.
Streaming transmission of nmon snapshots as they are written into nmon output file using sender script. This method results in no latency, however it requires more effort to implement.