NMONVisualizer

Overview

By default, NMONVisualizer names datasets by hostname. In many cases, this hostname may not be meaningful for reports or data analysis. To support friendly names for datasets, NMONVisualizer suports renaming by several methods. These can be accessed in the GUI via the Name Systems submenu under the File menu.

Three additional methods of renaming are supported:

• By LPAR name - using the Partition Name from the lparstat -i output embedded in nmon files.
• By nmon run name - using the runname attribute in the nmon AAA records. This can be specified by using the -r parameter when starting nmon.
• Using a custom JSON file to rename hosts directly, by regex or by the above two methods.

Note that if an nmon file does not have a runname or an LPAR name, the dataset will continue to be named using the default hostname.

JSON Format

To rename datasets using more complicated rules, a JSON file must be provided. The format is simply an array of rule objects. Each rule takes two values: a name to match and an alias to rename to. Renaming rules are processed in the order specified in the file. The first rule to match stops any further rules from being evaluated.

Names

The name attribute can either be name to indicate an exact hostname match or regex to indicate hostname matching by regular expression. If a name attribute is not specified, then the alias will match all hosts. This is useful for making the last element in the array a catch-all for hosts that to not match any previous names or regexes.

Aliases

The alias attribute can either be alias (direct substition) or aliasRegex. aliasRegex is optional, the previous regex can be reused.

Two special aliases are supported: $RUN and $LPAR. These are used to indicate the run name and LPAR name, respectively.

By default, renaming with a regex uses the first matching group (i.e. parentheses). This matching group will be used as the new hostname. The matching group can be changed by specifying the aliasByGroup attribute. Full string replacement is also possible by specifying the aliasByReplacement attribute.

Example

Here, names and aliases are used to directly rename datasets to user friendly names. If a host does not match, the LPAR name is used instead. Note the use of aliasByReplacement to rename the web servers using the regex v1018h(0[2-3]); web is appended to each host number. Since brackets are special characters in JSON, they must be unicode escaped.

[
    { "name": "v1018h01",
      "alias": "loadbalancer"
    },
    { "name": "v1018h(0\u005b2-3\u005d)",
      "aliasByReplacement": "web$1"
    },
    { "name": "v1018h04",
      "alias": "app01"
    },
    { "name": "v1018h05",
      "alias": "app02"
    },
    { "name": "v1018h06",
      "alias": "app03"
    },
    { "name": "v1018h16",
      "alias": "database"
    },
    {
      "alias": "$LPAR"
    }
]