power-hmc-exporter

power-hmc-exporter — Your Entire PowerVM Virtualization Layer, Mapped

Most Power monitoring stops at the operating system: CPU, memory and disks inside each LPAR. But the questions that actually cost you time live one layer down, in the virtualization — which shared pool is saturated, which VIOS bottlenecks which LPARs, which partition hammers a physical Fibre Channel port through NPIV, which LPARs sit behind a given SEA and VLAN. Today, answering them means hand-correlating lsmap, lshwres, fcstat and the HMC into a spreadsheet.

Instead, power-hmc-exporter reads the HMC’s Performance & Capacity Monitoring (PCM) facility and reconstructs that whole topology as live Prometheus metrics — processor and memory pools, the LPAR ↔ VIOS service relationships, and the SEA / NPIV / VSCSI mappings — with the cross-reference labels already resolved. As a result, the spreadsheet archaeology becomes a Grafana dashboard.

Processor & memory pools

Stop guessing about pool contention

The dashboards track per-managed-system shared processor pool utilization and memory pool allocation versus total, entitled-versus-consumed for every LPAR and VIOS, capped-versus-uncapped borrowing against entitlement, and virtual-processor ceilings. So you see which pool runs tight, and which partitions borrow from it — before your users feel it, not after.

LPAR ↔ VIOS

Every LPAR’s serving VIOS, resolved for you

Each per-LPAR network and storage series already carries the serving VIOS — the primary SEA VIOS (which self-corrects on a SEA failover), the VIOS behind each NPIV physical port, and the vhost serving each VSCSI disk. So you need no id→name joins and no lsmap archaeology. Better still, a built-in noisy-neighbour view surfaces the VIOS uplinks each critical LPAR actually depends on.

labels already resolved

# the serving VIOS, SEA and VLAN are on the series itself —
# no join against lsmap / lshwres needed
power_hmc_lpar_network_received_bytes{
  system="sys01", lpar="lpar07",
  vlan_id="191", sea="ent10",
  vios="vios02"} 4.81e+08

power_hmc_lpar_vfc_read_bytes{
  lpar="lpar07", fc="fcs1",
  vios="vios02"} 1.66e+09

SEA · NPIV · VSCSI

Network and storage, attributed to the LPAR

The exporter breaks SEA throughput down by the LPARs and VLANs riding it, maps NPIV virtual-FC traffic to the physical FC port and the VIOS that bridges it (with Top-N consumers per port), and ties VSCSI I/O to the serving vhost. So those cross-team questions that once needed a war-room — “who is saturating fcs1?”, “which LPAR is flooding this SEA?” — you now answer on a single screen.

Productivity & performance

Hours of correlation become seconds on a dashboard

Therefore you drill from a pool, SEA or FC-port spike straight to the offending LPAR and the VIOS that bridges it — in seconds, not an afternoon of topas, lsmap and fcstat. You right-size pools and entitlements with evidence, you charge back shared-adapter usage per LPAR, and you cut the back-and-forth between your AIX, network and storage teams. And because one central exporter polls the HMC, you install nothing on your partitions.

Three Grafana dashboards, included

Three ready-to-import dashboards ship in the package. So you just import the JSON, pick your Prometheus datasource, and you are done. From the estate-wide bird’s-eye view, down to a single managed system, and down to one partition and the VIOS it leans on.

Specs & Requirements

Deploy in 5 minutes

You run it on one central host, with no agent on your partitions. First, download the tarball, extract it, and run the installer — it creates the service account, places the binary, and installs the systemd unit and an environment template (and it preserves any existing credentials). Then set your HMC connection details and enable the service.

# 1. Extract and install
tar xzf power-hmc-exporter-v0.9.0-linux-amd64.tar.gz
cd power-hmc-exporter-v0.9.0-linux-amd64/
sudo ./install.sh

# 2. Set HMC host / user / password
sudo vi /etc/sysconfig/power-hmc-exporter

# 3. Enable and start the service
sudo systemctl enable --now power-hmc-exporter
journalctl -u power-hmc-exporter -f

Finally, add the scrape target to prometheus.yml and import the three dashboards under grafana/ via Dashboards → Import.

Licensing

We license power-hmc-exporter per managed system — one Power server (frame) managed through the HMC. A single exporter covers your whole estate, so you pay no separate fee for the host it runs on, and nothing per LPAR. The license is perpetual: pay once, use forever, and your first year includes updates and support. Simply set the quantity to the number of managed systems you monitor; for larger estates, contact us about volume licensing. You can also try it first with a fully-functional 30-day free trial. For licensing inquiries, contact legal@aixwatch.com.

Frequently Asked Questions

Deployment & compatibility