About Nmon Performance monitor for Splunk

  • Author: Guilhem Marchand
  • First release was published on starting 2014
  • Purposes:

The Nmon Performance application for Splunk implements the excellent and powerful nmon binary known as Nigel’s performance monitor. Originally developed for IBM AIX performance monitoring and analysis, it is now an Open source project that made it available to many other systems. It is fully available for any Linux flavor, and thanks to the excellent work of Guy Deffaux, it also available for Solaris 10/11 systems using the sarmon project.

The Nmon Performance monitor application for Splunk will generate performance and inventory data for your servers, and provides a rich number of monitors and tools to manage your AIX / Linux / Solaris systems.

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Nmon Performance is now associated with Octamis to provide professional solutions for your business, and professional support for the Nmon Performance solution.

For more information: Octamis professional support for business

Splunk versions

It is recommended to use Splunk 6.5.x or superior to run the latest core application release. (in distributed deployments, only search heads may have this requirement)

The last release can be downloaded from Splunk base: https://splunkbase.splunk.com/app/1753

Compatibility matrix for core application:

  • Current major release Version 1.9.x: Splunk 6.5.x or superior are officially supported

Splunk 6.4 will globally perform as expected, but there might be some unwanted behaviors such as css issues as this Splunk version is not supported anymore by the core application.

Stopped versions for older Splunk releases:

Compatibility matrix for TA-nmon addon:

Consult the TA-nmon documentation: http://ta-nmon.readthedocs.io

  • Both add-ons are compatible with any Splunk version 6.x (full instance of Universal Forwarder)

The TA-nmon add-on is designed to be deployed on full Splunk instances or Universal Forwarders, it is only compatible with Splunk 6.x.

The PA-nmon_light add-on is a minimal add-on designed to be installed on indexers (clusters or standalone), this package contains the default “nmon” index definition and parsing configuration. It excludes any kind of binaries, inputs or scripts, and does not collect nmon data.

Index time operations

The application operates index time operations, the PA-nmon_light add-on must be installed in indexers in order for the application to operate normally.

If there are any Heavy forwarders acting as intermediate forwarders between indexers and Universal Forwarders, the TA-nmon add-on must deployed on the intermediate forwarders to achieve successfully index time extractions.

Index creation

The Nmon core application does not create any index at installation time.

An index called “nmon” must be created manually by Splunk administrators to use the default TA-nmon indexing parameters. (this can be tuned)

However, deploying the PA-nmon_light will automatically defines the default “nmon” index. (pre-configured for clusters replication)

Note: The application supports any index starting with the “nmon*” name, however the default index for the TA-nmon inputs is set to “nmon” index.

In distributed deployments using clusters of indexers, the PA-nmon add-on will automatically creates the “nmon” replicated index.

Summarization implementation

Accelerated data models:

Nmon for Splunk App intensively uses data model acceleration in almost every user interfaces, reports and dashboards.

Splunk certification requirements prohibit the default activation of data models acceleration.

Since version 1.9.12, none of the data models are accelerated by default, this is your responsibility to decide if you wish to do so, bellow are the recommended acceleration parameters:

  • metrics related data models accelerated over a period of 1 year
  • non metrics data models accelerated over the last 30 days (Nmon config, Nmon processing)

Splunk Accelerated data models provide a great and efficient user experience.

Accelerated reports:

The following report(s) use report acceleration feature:

  • Volume of Data indexed Today, accelerated for last 7 days
  • Number of notable events in Data Processing or Data Collect since last 24 Hours, accelerated for last 24 hours

Please review the Large scale deployment considerations documentation.

About Nmon Performance Monitor

Nmon Performance Monitor for Splunk is provided in Open Source, you are totally free to use it for personal or professional use without any limitation, and you are free to modify sources or participate in the development if you wish.

Feedback and rating the application will be greatly appreciated.

Open source and licensed materials reference