[Review]: LPAR2RRD – Free Performance Monitoring

by Davoud Teimouri · Published 10/11/2017 · Updated 04/04/2019

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Introduction to LPAR2RRD

LPAR2RRD is a free tool for performance monitoring on server environments. It’s support IBM Power Systems and VMware vSphere. LPAR2RRD can retrieve the platforms performance data without install any agent like VMware vCenter or HMC (Hardware Management Console).

Also there is an agent for extending data collecting and also the tool supports NMON files for collecting data from operating systems.

LPAR2RRD supports the below platforms:

Agent less Platforms:
1. IBM Power Systems
2. VMware

IBM Power Systems agent less

VMware agent less

OS Agent Platforms:
1. AIX & Linux
2. IBM i (AS/400)
3. Solaris

OS agent

The History

The product development started in January 2007 when the author was looking for something what shows CPU utilization of IBM Power Systems™ servers in virtual environment and found nothing usable.
So the only option appeared to be developing something what helps him in that particular area and make his live as an IBM Power Systems™ admin easier.
After a few weeks there an initial version has been ready and then placed on IBM developerWorks for free download to anyone.
During years the product has been enhancing and it has became well known and popular within IBM Power Systems™ community. Development and support has been still sponsored only by the author via work in his free time.
Finally in mid of 2011 a decision has been taken to offer paid support. This has lead to accelerating further product development by making development financially independent.

Why use LPAR2RRD?

1st of all due to its unique web based GUI for graphical interpretation of performance utilization in virtualized environment. You can on a click find performance utilization of any physical box in a simple graphical form understandable from technician to the management level.
It is free for use. You do not need to invest into expensive commercial solutions. You can optionally buy support.
It does not require any administration in compare to other commercial tools where you need to have dedicated and trained staff for administration of them.

VMware Environment Performance Monitoring Features

Monitoring resources
- vCenter
- Cluster
- Resource Pool
- Datastore
- ESXi
- Virtual Machine (VM)
Monitoring metrics
- CPU performance (GHz, CPU cores, CPU ready)
- Memory usage (reserved, granted, consumed, active, baloon, swap in, limit)
- LAN performance in (MB/sec)
- Disk performance (MB/sec, IO per sec, latency in ms)
- Disk usage (GB)
Other features
- Trends
- Historical reports
- Heatmap
- Graph zooming

All data is retrieved agent less.
Data source is either the vCenter or ESXi itself in case it is not managed by the vCenter.

Heatmap

That feature shows actuall utilization of all virtual partitions (LPARs/VMs) in the table where each partition has its own item and the color depends on its actual utilization.