Shield Adds HMC, Security PTFs to Nagios Monitoring Solution
March 27, 2024 Alex Woodie
If you’d like to know what’s going on with your Hardware Management Console (HMC), you can do so through the updated Nagios offering from Shield Advanced Solutions. Version 2.1 of the company’s bundled AAG and NG4i offering also will automatically notify you when IBM has submitted security PTFs for the operating system or licensed products, and even download them for you.
After initially trying to use IBM’s open source Nagios software to monitor their customers’ high availability software environments, the folks at Shield Advanced Solutions took it upon themselves to develop their own Nagios distribution for the IBM i server, which debuted in 2023.
The Shield offering includes a Web-based monitoring console dubbed AAG, which is short for At-A-Glance, as well as NG4i (or Nagios for i), an IBM i-based plug-in for the Nagios framework that continuously monitors important metrics on the IBM i. Shield developed NG4i in C to provide high performance, according to Shield Director Chris Hird.
With the version 2.0 release of AAG/NG4i in 2023, NG4i supported about 130 different checks on the IBM i server, everything from disk state to the number of jobs to data transfer rates between systems, according to the list of AAG/NG4i notifications on the Shield website.
The number of checks has increased to about 180 with the version 2.1 of the offering, according to Shield’s March 15 press release. Arguably the most important feature is the addition of a dozen or so check commands for the HMC.
“The HMC is a very important part of the IBM Power management and needs to be monitored for a number of reasons,” Hird tells IT Jungle. “It’s something all of the MSP cloud providers who are running AAG/NG4i have asked us for.”
The AAG/NG4i solution will automatically run check commands against the HMC and its monitored partitions to determine their status. It will check the LED status, system state, memory defragmentation state, migration state, hibernation state, and RMC connection state, according to Shield’s documentation.
On the security front, version 2.1 has been bolstered to check IBM resources for any emergency program temporary fixes (PTFs) to patch security vulnerabilities in the IBM i operating system and related licensed program products (LPPs).
What’s more, AAG/NG4i will automatically download the required fixes directly to an image catalog, Shield says, thereby saving customers “hours of effort to identify, download and install the required PTFs.” “The checks provided with AAG/NG4i ensure you do not miss an important fix which could expose your IBM i to a bad actor,” the company says.
Shield also improved how it integrates with other components of the Nagios stack, specifically Nagios IX, an enterprise version developed by Nagios Enterprise. Shield debuted a wizard last year for AAG/NG4i customers who want to run their IBM i Nagios software in an enterprise environment, but the Shield software also works with the open source Nagios Core offering, which can run in any Linux partition or even a Raspberry Pi).
“We did a lot more in terms of managing the check commands that we would install and added all of the new checks from the updates that have been shipped since 2.0 was released,” Hird tells us. “The HMC wizard needed to be updated because we changed the way the HMC checks are run now.”
AAG/NG4i has gained traction around the world, and Shield has responded by improving its language support. In version 2.1, it has added support for additional language installs in Nagios XI environments. That allows the AAG/NG4i product to work properly on IBM i systems that do not have the 2924 language feature installed, the company says.
“Some keyboard mappings from languages such as 2939 and the German keyboard caused problems with how we structured the data returned to Nagios,” Hird explained. “It has to be converted from the local language to ASCII and Nagios XI does not have the same level of language support that the IBM i has.”
Shield is constantly seeking to improve both the performance and the ease-of-use of the product, Hird said, adding that the company is looking at adding new check commands that are application specific, as well as new ways of providing insights into the IBM i environment using the data collected by NG4i.
For more information, see https://www.shieldadvanced.com/.
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