We have just added a couple of new checks to the AAG product that will allow system administrators to quickly see when IBM releases new firmware updates / upgrades. There are 2 types of firmware update (update is next fix pack for the current release, upgrade is an update to the next major release) both of which can be disruptive updates (full restart of the system required).
IBM has provided an SQL script (SELECT * FROM SYSTOOLS.FIRMWARE_CURRENCY) that can be run on the IBM i to look at the currently installed Firmware level and check against a list which is downloaded from an IBM website on the internet. This means that you must have access to the internet from the IBM i to allow this to work.
As we have seen from a number of our customers, they do not always allow their IBM i to access the internet which means this does not work for them. However they do allow their Nagios Monitoring solution to access the internet ( in most cases) so having the check run from the Nagios Monitoring solution means they can run a check for the latest Firmware levels available and match against what is installed on their system.
When we first looked at this we thought that it would be good to run a check on the IBM i which will pull back the firmware level and then pass this back to the Nagios plug in for matching. However we realized that this was not necessary if the system was managed by the HMC as we can pull back the firmware level of the system directly from the HMC. The firmware is the same for all LPARs running on the system so having a single check made a lot of sense, however not everyone has systems that are managed by an HMC so we also provided a check that could be run directly to the IBM i. We now have 2 checks for AAG that can provide the required information regardless of the system environment.
The following is the IBM i based check which we ran against our test LPAR, (it only needs to be run against a single LPAR, running against multiple LPARs on the same system would be a waste of resources.).
The following is a firmware check using the HMC check, as can bee seen the results are the same. The system may run only AIX or Linux on Power so using this method is a lot more flexible and services more requirements.
We are constantly looking for new ideas on what we should be monitoring or even changing the monitoring to better suit the customer environment, so if you have something in particular you would be interested in seeing added please let us know. If you are interested in a demo use the relevant form on our website and we will be in touch to set something up.