Sun SyMON

SyMON 3.0 was developed by the server division of Sun to provide a graphical user interface to its server products. It is deliberately very hardware specific, and it covers functionality that generic tools from other vendors do not address. In particular, it contains detailed knowledge of the configuration of a system and identifies low-level faults (such as correctable memory and disk errors) or high temperature levels that might lead to downtime if they are not identified and acted on. SyMON has a configuration browser that contains full-color images of system components as well as a simple hierarchy view.

The GUI monitors only a single system at a time but is a distributed application. A data collection process is all that runs on the server. An event monitor process runs on a separate machine and looks for problems. In the event of system downtime, the event monitor can raise the alarm even if the GUI is not in use. The Motif GUI can be installed on a separate desktop system. As a performance management tool, SyMON is equivalent to HP’s GlancePlus product in that it does not store long-term data (a rolling two-hour history is available), but it does graph all the usual performance data. Its configurable alert capability has many predefined rules and can pass SNMP traps to a network management package; it also has an event log viewer.

SyMON can monitor any of Sun’s UltraSPARC-based systems. It is supported only on server configurations, but because the Ultra 1 and Ultra 2 workstations are the basis for the Enterprise 150 and Enterprise 2, it works on them just as well. (The graphical view of an E150 appears if you use it on an Ultra 1, however.)