Wow, today I logged into my first AIX Server in about 4.5 years. It was a horrible experience. I’ve been working with Redhat/CentOS pretty much exculsively for so long, I was mostly helpless to do anything of importance on the CLI other than create a few users and move some files around.  None of the common commands that I am so used to using even exist in AIX.

Figured I would do a bit of homework and figure out how to do some basic troubleshooting before I was in a server down situation with no idea how to troubleshoot.

Checking Free Memory

To check free memory on a box use the svmon command.

svmon -G

Overall System Status

For this you will probably want to use topas, which is pretty simiar to top. Topas gives you a quick and dirty overview of what is going on on a system. Here you can find CPU usage, top processes, disk utililization. Check out the fancy screen shot below.

List Volume Groups

Wow, Linux has really confused me on this one. Anyway, use lsvg

# lsvg -o
rootvg
crsrdb_bin
crsprdb_data
crsprdb_index
crsprdb_arch
crsprdb_rman

List Info About a Volume Group.

# lsvg rootvg

Display Names of all Logical Volumes in a Volume Group.

# lsvg -l rootvg

Display Physical Memory

# lsattr -El sys0 -a realmem

Finding Disk I/O Issues

Sar appears to be a fine option here. Especially since I am looking for percent busy. Iostat also exists on AIX, btw.

# sar -d 1 2

Show Network Throughput

The more I poke around the internet trying to figure out how to actually use AIX the more I keep running into topas. Anyway this one is a good one

#topas -E

I plan to have more of these one liners documented here in the future, but for now this is going to have to do.