Spotlight on DB2 6.10 - User Guide

What is Spotlight on Unix

Spotlight is powerful diagnostic and monitoring tool for Unix operating systems. Its unique user interface provides you with an intuitive, visual representation of the activity on your host machine. Graphical flows illustrate the rate at which data is moving between system components. Icons display the value of key statistics and measurements (metrics).

The power of Spotlight lies in its ability to provide visual and audible warnings if the performance metrics exceed acceptable thresholds. The components and dataflows change color to show you the source of the problem.

A range of visual graphs and tabular grids provide you with detailed information about your Unix hosts. This information can be viewed on the screen or printed.

You can set Spotlight to warn you when a threshold is reached. You may set a number of thresholds so that warning messages are displayed well before the traffic levels into or out of a host become critical. Spotlight uses a number of different techniques to warn you when a Unix host is exceeding a threshold.

When Spotlight detects a condition that it considers is a potential problem, it not only informs you about it, but also advises you what you could look at to diagnose the problem further, and suggests corrective actions.

Features of Spotlight on Unix

Some of the main features and benefits of Spotlight on Unix are that it:

• Provides a visual representation of process flows within Unix, allowing you to observe actual host activity in real time.

• Visually identifies bottlenecks and provides extensive drilldown capabilities.

• Displays the details of problem areas, including CPUs, disks, processes, and system calls statistics for rapid problem identification.

• Provides visual and audible warnings to alert you when performance metrics exceed acceptable thresholds.

• Provides detailed information about specific components through the use of drilldowns, therefore allowing you to pin point the source of problems.

• Assesses the normal rate of process flows via a calibration process, and sets the display speed of the visual indicators accordingly.

• Is easy to install.

Connect to Unix Systems

Spotlight is powerful diagnostic and problem-resolution tool for Unix and Linux operating systems. Its unique user interface provides you with an intuitive, visual representation of the activity on your host machine.

For information on Spotlight on Unix, see these sections

For information on using Spotlight applications See

Spotlight Basics

Configure the Unix System

To monitor a Unix system with Spotlight, ensure the Unix system is configured as follows.

Unix servers and versions.

Spotlight supports the following server operating systems:

• Sun Solaris 9, 10, 11
• HP-UX 11i, 11i v2, 11i v3
• IBM AIX 5.2, 5.3, 6.1
• Red Hat and SUSE operating systems running Linux 2.4 and 2.6 kernels

Unix programs.

Ensure the following Unix programs are accessible to the Unix login (through Spotlight):

For HP-UX, additionally

For AIX, additionally

For Solaris, additionally

Unix User Permissions and Installation Settings

• The Unix user should have no special processing on log-on. In particular there must be no input required from the user, and nor should any special login banners be displayed.
• On AIX, the user must be a member of the "adm" group to be able to run the sar command.
• On Linux, the sysstat package must be installed to enable the user to get detailed disk I/O information.
• On Linux the /proc filesystem must be present.
• For connection using SSH, the sshd daemon must be installed and running.

Remote Connectivity: SSH or REXEC

Spotlight on Unix will require you to select the connection type: SSH or REXEC. Information on SSH and REXEC is freely available on the Internet. We recommend SSH as password data is transmitted encrypted. REXEC does not encrypt password data.

Notes:

• Make sure the relevant SSH or REXEC daemon is running on the Unix machine and is configured to receive remote connections.
• Commands to observe system activity (for example, netstat, vmstat, iostat, sar) must be accessible to REXEC / SSH sessions for Spotlight to observe Unix activity. Ensure these commands are located in the search path for REXEC / SSH sessions. If not, Spotlight will display an error.

Notes (Specific to SSH):

• Spotlight supports both SSH1 and SSH2 protocols.
• To allow Spotlight to make SSH connections to any Unix or Linux hosts that permit SSH connections, you may need to alter the PasswordAuthentication configuration item in the sshd_config file. Set the value of PasswordAuthentication to yes. Once you have modified the sshd_config file you must restart the sshd process to apply the new setting.

• Public-key encryption is supported under SSH2 only. DSA and RSA are supported.

Note (Specific to REXEC): When Spotlight is monitoring a Unix operating system via REXEC with a valid user ID and password, remote commands may not work on the Unix host unless that user ID is added to the /etc/hosts.equiv file on the host.

Related Topics

Spotlight Connection Manager

Spotlight Browser

Troubleshooting Spotlight on Unix