nmon showing the basics: CPU and memory |
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| Developer(s) | Nigel Griffiths |
|---|---|
| Operating system | AIX, Linux |
| Type | System monitor |
| Website | nmon for AIX and Linux Performance Monitoring |
nmon (short for Nigel's Monitor) is a popular system monitor tool for the AIX and Linux operating systems.
Contents |
The original nmon was a freely downloadable tool for AIX 4.3 from the AIX wiki. It was also rewritten for the Linux operating system running on IA-32, x86-64, RS/6000 and Power processor and Mainframe and released by IBM to open source in July 2009. Its features were then bundled as part of the AIX operating systems from AIX 5.3 TL09 and AIX 6.1 TL02 within the topas command. It is used by AIX and Linux Systems Administrators and performance tuning specialists around the world.
The features that make nmon unique are:
nmon takes very little CPU time to run but captures the key performance numbers.nmon concentrates on useful performance information for the performance tuner and in a concise layout to aim understanding. This includes: CPU, memory, disks, adapters, networks, NFS, Kernel statistics, File-systems, Workload Manger (AIX), Workload Partitions (AIX) and Top Processes.nmon includes support for older AIX releases, Linux running on x86, POWER and Mainframe platforms nmon is a tool that can be used to monitor them all.nmon has been presented at many IT conferences including the UK UNIX User Group 2006 and IBM Power Systems Technical Universities held in the USA, European and Asia.On AIX there is the topas command that can output reports to a file but this is not in a format that can be used easily as a source for a spread sheet or web tools like rrdtool.
On Linux there is the top command which is good for CPU and processes but does not cover disks and networks. For disk I/O, the iostat command can give you the details. But neither of these commands allow saving data in a format suitable for a spreadsheet or simple further processing. Linux utility dstat can be used to produce text data, even in comma separated value format, which is quite suitable for spreadsheet programs.
For monitoring many systems at a higher level the Ganglia open source tool is a good addition to lower detailed level. nmon and Ganglia both support UNIX (including AIX) and Linux systems.