Measures for host health

Individual Host pages show problem history, event history, and related processes for each host. To assess health, the following performance metrics are captured for each host and presented on each Host overview page:

CPU
Memory
Disk (storage health)
NIC (network health)

CPU health

CPU usage is the primary measurement used to calculate CPU health. This is the percentage of time that a CPU is busy processing data (i.e., when it's not idle). This percentage is computed for all available CPU cores and scaled to a range of 0–100%.

The same calculation method is used for both total CPU usage of a system and CPU usage of a specific process group. This means that a process group that's composed of a single threaded process on a 4-core system will reach maximum CPU usage at 25% (4 x 25% = 100%).

A high CPU usage measurement results in a CPU saturation "resource event" and the generation of a problem.

CPU usage measurements are captured every 10 seconds. The average CPU consumption of each 10-second interval is used to calculate total CPU usage. Because DESK averages CPU consumption across 10-second intervals, momentary fluctuations in CPU consumption which happen during the 10-second cycle may be flattened out, but the average CPU consumption over each of the 10-second periods is accurate.

Additional performance measurements for virtualized hosts

Virtualized hosts show additional measurements related to CPU performance. These values are important to overall virtual machine health.

CPU Ready time
Percentage of time that the virtual machine was ready, but not scheduled to run on the physical CPU.
Note: CPU Ready time should remain below 10%. A CPU Ready time measurement of over 10% indicates that your virtual machines are competing for available resources the virtual machine is unable to execute all of its tasks. Such contention can lead to a drop in application performance. For more information, see How does virtual machine migration affect performance?
CPU AWS
The CPU consumption as reported by OneAgent from the perspective of AWS itself, rather than from within the host.
Physical CPU The amount of actively used virtual CPU as a percentage of total available CPU. This is the host view of CPU usage, not the guest operating system view. It is the average CPU utilization over all available virtual CPUs on the virtual machine. For example, if a virtual machine with one virtual CPU is running on a host that has four physical CPUs and the CPU usage is 100%, then you know that the virtual machine is utilizing 100% of one physical CPU's available resources.

Additional performance measurements for AIX hosts

AIX hosts show additional measurements related to CPU performance. These values are important to overall virtual machine health.

Entitlement configured
Configurable setting in the LPAR definition where you specify the default minimum number of the physical CPU cores that will be assigned to this LPAR. This metric reflects the setting value and not the actual consumption. The consumption may differ depending on the availability of the physical CPU.
Entitlement used
Percent of your configured entitlement that was used. Considering that your LPAR might receive more CPU than you've configured in the entitlement, the value can reach more than 100%.
Physical CPU consumed
Number of physical CPU cores consumed.
Threads running
Average number of runnable kernel threads over the sampling period. This is the number of threads that are waiting to run or already running.
A stable workload typically has fewer than five threads running. A rapid increase in the number of threads running may indicate an application problem. Threads competing for the CPU resource are scheduled in round-robin fashion. The number of runnable threads could exceed 100 if every thread executes for a complete or partial time segment.
Threads blocked
Average number of kernel threads that are put in the wait queue through the sampling period. Kernel threads are added to the wait queue when they are scheduled for execution and are waiting for one of their process pages to be requested.
I/O message wait
Average number of threads waiting for I/O messages from raw devices. Raw devices are the devices that are directly attached to the system.
I/O direct, buffered
Number of threads per second that are waiting for the file system direct I/O event to occur and number of processes that are asleep waiting for buffered I/O. Value of this metric may differ from the real value. It represents the sum of two of the six elements that amount to the real value.
Virtual CPU
Number of physical CPU cores assigned to a logical partition.
Logical CPU
Number of processors derived by applying simultaneous multithreading (SMT) technology to each virtual processor. For example, 2 virtual processors, each with 4 SMT threads, provides 8 logical CPUs.
Simultaneous multithreading (SMT)
Number of independent threads of execution (to better utilize processor resources).

Memory health

Host pages include two memory-related metrics for your hosts, Memory used and Page faults. Both measurements and other factors, are used to correlate and calculate host high memory incidents.

Memory used
Percentage of total RAM used by processes. RAM used by system caches and buffers isn't included in this metric. DESK calculates memory usage as:
memory_used = total_memory_size - (free_memory + active_memory + inactive_memory + reclaimamble_memory)
Page faults
Number of major page faults per second. Major page faults involve loading a page from disk, thereby adding disk latency to the interrupted program’s execution.

Additional performance measurements for virtualized hosts

Virtualized hosts show additional measurements related to virtual machine memory usage. These metrics, along with other measurements, are used to detect memory saturation incidents.

Memory compressed
The rate of memory compression or decompression. Virtual machine management platforms use memory compression to reduce memory usage. Memory compression saves memory but requires additional CPU cycles. Content that had been previously compressed must be decompressed before it can be used by a virtual machine.
Memory swapped
Rate at which memory is swapped from disk into active memory, and vice-versa, from active memory to disk.

Disk health

Disk health includes:

Throughput
The total number of bytes read and written to disk per second.
IOPS
I/O (input/output) operations per second. Operations are counted after operations addressing adjacent disk sectors are merged.
Disk latency
Time from I/O request submission to I/O request completion. The average delay of disk read and write operations in milliseconds. This metric is used to detect host slow disk incidents.
Disk space usage
The amount of disk space that's been used.
Idle time
Amount of time the disk has been idle.

NIC health

NIC health includes:

Traffic
The average rate at which data was transmitted during the interval.
Packets
The number of received and sent packets over the host network interface during the interval.
Quality
The assessment of the number of dropped packets and errors.
Connectivity
Percentage of properly established TCP connections compared to TCP connections that were refused or timed out.
Note: The Connectivity measure can be used as an indicator of whether or not there's network traffic on a host. Please note however that 0% connectivity doesn't necessarily indicate that there is a problem with a host. Assuming no TCP errors are present, it may simply mean that no users have attempted to connect to the host process during the selected timeframe.