How to monitor AIX processes

I've been fighting how to get process monitoring on AIX for about a month now.  First off, if you are using

the native SNMP agent that comes with the OS, it's likely you won't get it to function until future OS releases. 

They don't support the RFC 2790 Host-Resources-MIB that you need and unless you are a complete genius

with Unix and SNMP, don't waste time trying to get that avenue working.  Use Net-SNMP from

http://net-snmp.org.  Net-SNMP is native to most modern version of Linux now, and it works without

configuration, practically.  Expect to bang your head a bit, but you can get it working on AIX, too. 

Here's how:

First off, some resources I'd rather not blatantly plagiarize:

 andrea.brancatelli.it/.../

and

http://zaco.tistory.com/50

These two sites have gotten me pretty much 75% of the way through the process of getting NET-SNMP

properly installed on AIX.  It's really not a difficult job (once you do it right once).

 Download the files from Net-SNMP to your AIX server and when you get to the ./configure, STOP. 

Use this command instead:

  ./configure --enable-as-needed --without-kmem-usage --with-mib-modules=host

This one trick will save you a lot of time getting the compile to give you exactly what you want. 

I would recommend using v2c and public as a community string until you have snmpwalk working,

then change for security.  If you have problems the following two commands are very valuable tools:

/usr/local/sbin/snmpd -f -L

and

snmp -v 2c -c public -m ALL localhost .1.3 | more

Once you think you have it installed properly, use the following command to verify:

snmpwalk -v 2c -c public -m ALL localhost .1.3 | more  

When you see about 80 pages of HOST-RESOURCE-MIB data, you have done it!  Now change your

community string for security or move to SNMPv3 (my next project)

Note:  This will not give you a display of processes like Application Monitor used to.  You have to know

what processes you want to monitor with Application Performance Monitor.  Just put your snmpwalk to

a lis file and use the info from there.  Once I got it working once, it was a piece of cake.

Craig Blackman

Intec Managed Services

Systems Administrator