How does the Zabbix Agent calculate processor load? [AIX]

[rcollier]

Hello everyone,

Last week I upgraded our OS (AIX 6.1) to the latest service pack and technology level. The upgrade required the server to be rebooted. After the reboot, the Zabbix agent on that server has been reporting higher-than-normal CPU loads. To investigate this, I used AIX performance tools such as topas, vmstat, and sar to see if there was a process that was causing the higher load. What I saw was nothing.

I contacted IBM support and they had me send in a plethora of perf data for them to analyze. The IBM rep came back and advised that system resources looked fine. This made me think that something may have gone wrong with the agent, so today I upgraded the agent on that server to the latest level. The agent is still reporting higher cpu loads.

I'm curious which commands the agent runs to determine CPU load. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Has anyone seen something similar?

Thanks

[tchjts1]

I'm curious which commands the agent runs to determine CPU load. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Has anyone seen something similar?

Thanks

I think I might have that information. Not sure though. I won't have access to look until Monday. I do remember at my previous work location where we monitored AIX, the technology level differences within a version caused us lots of pain with the Zabbix agent. It came to be that we would have 2 or 3 agents for one version of AIX depending on the tech level.

If you have the opportunity to compile an agent yourself on the tech level you are seeing issues on, and replace the Zabbix agent binary, you may want to try that to see if it makes a difference.

[rcollier]

So, I compiled the agent myself and replaced the current binary that I am using with the new one that came from the compile. The processor load data remains unchanged. So it doesn't look like compiling it on my own made a difference.

[tchjts1]

Ok. I will take a look through my docs on Monday and see if I can find what they use to get that data. The reason I would have it is because we engaged Zabbix devs to develop a lot of AIX functionality back in the 1.8 version. I don't recall if they gave us that level of detail on how the data is gathered, but I will check.

[rcollier]

Thanks tchjts1, I appreciate it.

[tchjts1]

Sent you an e-mail.