Monitoring the Cluster

By design, failures of components in the cluster are handled automatically. But you need to be aware of all such events. Chapter 9: Monitoring an HACMP Cluster, describes various tools you can use to check the status of an HACMP cluster, the nodes, networks, and resource groups within that cluster, and the daemons that run on the nodes.

The HACMP software incudes the Cluster Information Program (Clinfo), an SNMP-based monitor. The HACMP for AIX software provides the HACMP for AIX MIB, associated with and maintained by the HACMP for AIX management agent, the Cluster SMUX peer daemon (clsmuxpd). Clinfo retrieves this information from the HACMP for AIX MIB through the clsmuxpd.

Clinfo can run on cluster nodes and on HACMP for AIX client machines. It makes information about the state of an HACMP cluster and its components available to clients and applications via an application programming interface (API). Clinfo and its associated APIs enable a developer to write applications that recognize and respond to changes within a cluster.

The Clinfo program, the HACMP MIB, and the API are documented in Programming Client Applications (part of the HACMP for AIX documentation set).

Although the combination of HACMP and the high availability features built into the AIX system keeps single points of failure to a minimum, there are still failures that, although detected, can cause other problems. See chapter 15 in the Planning and Installation Guide, for suggestions on customizing error notification for various problems not handled by the HACMP events.