Modern monitoring for AIX and VIOS?
Yes, it is possible!
Last week I was celebrating my birthday and finishing the ski season with the Frankfurt Ski Club in Zermatt, Switzerland. Of course, I’ve got some nice gifts. But do you know which message I got exactly on my birthday?
Hey Andrey, greetings from the Prometheus Team - we've just released a node_exporter AIX build (see github repo).
What could I answer? Yup, thanks for your birthday wishes! ;-)
Prometheus
No, it was not about the titan from Greek mythology, who helped people to steal fire from the gods.
It is about Prometheus monitoring software, which was started many years ago by SoundCloud, and is now a part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Prometheus is very popular in different clouds. It is easy to deploy, and paired with Grafana, it makes monitoring very visual and democratic.
No, Prometheus does not run on AIX.
If you wish to try an older version of Prometheus on AIX, you can do it. Several years ago, I ported some Prometheus versions to AIX, which you could find on my power-devops.com site. But the site doesn’t work right now.
The patches to the Prometheus code were not accepted because AIX is missing some functions available on Linux, and without these functions, Prometheus can’t guarantee that the data was written to the disk.
But Prometheus was available for Linux on IBM Power (ppc64le) for years.
Node Exporter
Prometheus works with so-called exporters that are installed on target servers.
The exporters are small HTTP (or HTTPS) servers that provide metrics - data about the target server.
Prometheus collects information from those exporters - or scrapes them.
There are exporters for specific services, and there are exporters for the operating system - node exporters.
Of course, it was not a big problem to compile the standard node exporter for AIX. I did it almost the same time, I ported Prometheus to AIX. But the node exporter didn’t collect any useful information about AIX.
This was the reason to start developing Google Go interface to AIX libperfstat. It is available freely on Github - https://github.com/power-devops/perfstat/.
I also tried to develop my own AIX node exporter, but never published it.
But now there is an official AIX node exporter from the Prometheus Team!
How to get the AIX node exporter
It is very easy!
Open the node exporter Github repo
On the right side, find “Releases” and click the latest release
Now you should see the latest release and assets for it
Click node_exporter-1.11.1.aix-ppc64.tar.gz (or what is the latest release when you read it) and download the file.
The archive contains only three files:
LICENSE
NOTICE
node_exporter
What you need is the last file. You can copy it to the target system and run it there. There are no dependencies and no installation.
How to run the AIX node exporter
The easiest way to run it is simply to start it.
After you started it, it listens on port 9100, and you can check if it is working by using curl:
curl http://localhost:9100/metricsYou will get a long list with different metrics.
You don’t need any special knowledge to get through the list and check which metrics are delivered by the node exporter.
Of course, you don’t want to start the node exporter every time manually. You can simply add it to /etc/inittab like:
mkitab 'node_exporter:23456789:once:/usr/bin/node_exporter >/dev/console 2>&1Now it starts every time with the system.
Common Europe Congress 2026 is there!
The agenda is published! Do you want to know where AIX is going to? It means you MUST visit the Common Europe Congress in Lyon, France. There will be sessions about new AIX features and open source community development. We will talk about AIX and IBM Power automation and Zero Downtime for AIX. Join me in Lyon!
Do you have any ideas how to make it better?
I didn’t do any thorough tests of the new node exporter. I only started it on AIX 7.3 TL3 and checked if it works.
It will definitely not work on POWER7. Because it is compiled with Google Go, and the Google Go compiler supports only POWER8 or newer CPUs.
It will probably not work on AIX 7.1, 6.1, or 5.3. I don’t have any AIX 5.3 to test, but if I have time, I will test it with AIX 6.1 or 7.1.
It probably doesn’t have all the metrics you need. It definitely has fewer metrics if you compare it to njmon.
If you have any ideas on what can be done better or any suggestions for metrics, let me know! Simply answer to the newsletter, if you’ve got it by email, or write a comment down. I will check and make a patch to enable the metric you need.
Have fun with the AIX node exporter!
Andrey
Hi, I am Andrey Klyachkin, IBM Champion and IBM AIX Community Advocate. This means I don’t work for IBM. Over the last twenty years, I have worked with many different IBM Power customers all over the world, both on-premise and in the cloud. I specialize in automating IBM Power infrastructures, making them even more robust and agile. I co-authored several IBM Redbooks and IBM Power certifications. I am an active Red Hat Certified Engineer and Instructor.
Follow me on LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube.
You can meet me at events like IBM TechXchange, the Common Europe Congress, and GSE Germany’s IBM Power Working Group sessions.