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Monitoring an IBM z/OS server

Posted: Thu Jul 05, 2018 3:17 am
by vlhelgoualch
Hello everyone and sorry for my bad English,

I'm actually in an internship in a company that require me to install a monitoring solution for a IBM z/OS server for one of their client using Nagios. Thing is, I already used Nagios once but only to monitor Windows and Unix client and z/OS is completely unknown to me.

The point would be not to only monitor all the VM inside the z/OS server but the z/OS itself and the MVS event it generate. The question is, is it possible to monitor this type of event with Nagios? And if so, is there already a plugin doing it? I don't know if it's possible to install nsclient++ in z/OS or if you have to do something else..
I searched the solution online but it does not seems to be a really frequent problem and didn't find anything.

Could someone help me and tell me if what they demand is possible or if I'm going straight into a wall?

Thank you in advance for your help.

Re: Monitoring an IBM z/OS server

Posted: Thu Jul 05, 2018 5:05 pm
by scottwilkerson
Unfortunately z/OS is completely unknown to me either, have no idea what it is but doubt you could install nsclient++

Good luck on your project, wish I could be of more assistance

Re: Monitoring an IBM z/OS server

Posted: Thu Jul 05, 2018 6:06 pm
by mcapra
It looks like z/OS has an awful lot of management/administration commands available on it if you could find some way to programatically execute them (I doubt NRPE/NSClient++ would be easy to compile):
https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgece ... commds.htm

You could probably build out an application on the z/OS machine itself to execute the various commands to assess the system's state, then interpret the results and submit passive checks to Nagios Core via NRDP.

I've worked with a few different monitoring platforms and none of them seem to have clear-cut integration with z/OS. Probably because IBM really super duper wants you to buy their monitoring software.

Unfortunately, due to the ... exclusivity ... of most IBM platforms, that's about all the help I can offer without a few thousand dollars for hardware and a license ;)

Re: Monitoring an IBM z/OS server

Posted: Fri Jul 06, 2018 2:07 am
by vlhelgoualch
Thanks you for your fast answer :) .

Seems like this will be more difficult than i though then. But I found this doc about how SNMP work on z/OS http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.w ... wg27007146, this could help.

I'm going to try what you suggest mcapra and see is I can find a way to forward the SNMP queries from the z/OS to the Nagios server with what I found, but reading all of this and understanding it will take time...

I'll keep you in touch of my progress if this work out or not. If I can made it before the end of my internship, I'll post my internship report on how to install it there.

Re: Monitoring an IBM z/OS server

Posted: Fri Jul 06, 2018 10:30 am
by scottwilkerson
If you can enable SNMP things will get easier to monitor but you then have the challenge of what SNMP oids are worth monitoring on z/OS