Server Diagnostic Tool for HP, IBM, and Other Major Hardware Vendors

When network problems begin to manifest, identifying the root cause is often easier said than done. Given the complexity of modern networks, there are multiple potential hardware failure points that problems can stem from and pinpointing whether the issue is related to bandwidth constraints, malfunctioning components, misconfigurations, or some combination of faults can be difficult without the proper server diagnostic tools.

A server failure or slowdown, for instance, can be caused by an overburdened CPU, malfunctioning power supply, insufficient memory or disk space, or other factors. Environmental factors like voltage fluctuations or fan failures can also create issues. Having an HP, Dell, or IBM server diagnostic tool makes it easier to identify root causes, troubleshoot network hardware issues, and ensure your system performance is optimized.

Hardware monitoring is foundational to improving network performance, and server diagnostic tools provide real-time visibility into the status of your infrastructure and the utilization of key resources—like CPU load, memory usage, and disk capacity—as well as the ability to examine historical performance for signs of previously undetected patterns or cycles. Hardware monitoring allows you to establish baselines for important metrics like server temperature and CPU fan speed and receive notifications if these metrics reach or exceed critical thresholds. These baselines can be leveraged to forecast utilization and capacity needs, which is critical to determining your procurement strategies as your business’s needs expand and change. However, without robust, Dell, IBM, or HP server hardware diagnostic tools, you’ll lack the visibility and data to be able to accurately forecast.

Finally, while monitoring metrics is crucial, metrics alone don’t paint a holistic and comprehensive picture of your network infrastructure—server hardware diagnostic tools provide the context that ties performance metrics to the mission-critical services and applications they support. When urgent issues appear, you can move quickly to remediate the situation while continuing to proactively detect repair potential failures before they impact your overall network performance.

Server diagnostic tools allow you to view, compare, analyze, and generate reports on all essential metrics and business-critical network entities, like nodes, volumes, and applications—all from a single pane of glass. The best Dell, HP, and IBM server hardware diagnostic tools will also include capabilities for visualizing and comparing data collected from on-premises, cloud-based, and virtual servers.

Some hardware metrics commonly monitored by server diagnostic tools include temperature, fan speed, power supply, chassis management controller, blade chassis, and others. When component monitors detect metrics reaching warning or critical states, server hardware diagnostic tools typically include features that allow you to quickly respond the moment issues arise, from remotely rebooting failed servers to managing server processes and scheduled tasks. These solutions should also be able to function as a memory diagnostic tool for servers.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) provides a holistic and cohesive view of the status information for your network infrastructure, regardless of vendor and hardware type or location. SAM offers comprehensive Dell, IBM, and HP server hardware diagnostic tools with component monitors for the following performance metrics (among others):

• Read and write cache hit percentage. These monitors track the efficiency of the read and write cache rates. While read and write cache hit rates can vary based on the specific applications you are running, size of the data volumes you are operating on, and type of data you are operating on, your read cache rate and write cache rate should ideally be between 80 and 90%. Consistently low read and write cache rates are often a sign that the IDS server is performing more disk reads and writes than are ideal—which can dramatically slow down the performance of your databases. IBM server hardware diagnostic tools are critical to ensuring optimal performance.
  
• Page reads and writes per second. This metric refers to the count per second of reads or writes issued to physical database pages. Low values are desirable, as a larger number of page reads or writes per second could be a sign that your database’s indexing or memory capacity are constrained and need to be reevaluated. SAM’s memory diagnostic tools for servers can offer visibility into issues like these.
  
• Lock requests per second. When end users access databases, locks are used to reserve access to specific database objects. This component monitor retrieves the rate per second that database sessions requested locks on objects.
  
• Lock waits per second. Related to lock requests per second, this monitor tracks the rate of events per second that require database sessions to wait for a successful lock.
  
• Deadlocks per second. Deadlocks occur when one or more end users hold locks and seek to acquire a lock owned by another user. This puts transactions at a standstill and will cause all activity within the database to come to halt until the database management system detects the issue and aborts one or more of the transactions at fault. IBM Informix leverages the lock table to automatically identify and prevent potential deadlocks from happening. This component monitor reports the rate of deadlocks per second, which should ideally be as low as possible.
  
• DataDB available space. This component monitor reports the amount of space available in the monitored database in megabytes. The ideal value should be as high as possible to prevent databases from becoming overloaded and performing poorly. Which dbspace is being reported on can be adjusted by altering your SQL queries and name = ‘datadbs’ section to reflect the appropriate name.
  
• Average Index Hit Ratio (%). This monitor tracks the average index hit ratio for all your buffers. This can also be executed manually via the SQL command SELECT * FROM SYSIBMADM.BP_HITRATIO. The hit ratio for specific buffers can be retrieved using the following construction:
  
  SELECT REAL(AVG(INDEX_HIT_RATIO_PERCENT))
  
  FROM SYSIBMADM.BP_HITRATIO
  
  WHERE BP_NAME = 'IBMDEFAULTBP'
  
  
  Higher retrieved values are more desirable for this metric.
  

SAM is a manufacturer-agnostic application and provides useful Dell, HP, and IBM server diagnostic tools that seamlessly integrate with the SolarWinds Orion^® Platform, bringing you a powerful tool kit of visibility, monitoring, and management solutions accessible through a convenient web console.

• Database Performance Analyzer
• Server Configuration Monitor
• Storage Resource Monitor

• Server Monitoring
• Dell Server Monitoring
• HP Server Monitoring
• Server Uptime Monitoring
• Web Server Monitoring
• Remote Server Monitoring
• Application Discovery and Dependency Mapping
• Java Server Monitoring