Our blog “How To Smartly Manage Your Netezza System’s Health Beyond IBM EOS” focused on the challenges of maintaining the system health of legacy IBM Netezza appliances post IBM EOS.
Since we published this blog, many Netezza customers, whether or not they are signed up to our Netezza Support Plus service, have benefitted from our free Smart Healthcheck Report. All it requires is to download and execute a file.
We are pleased to advise that we have recently expanded the scope of the Smart Healthcheck Report to include Netezza Performance Server systems running on Cloud Pak for Data, and so any customer running one or more of these systems can now also get this report for free.
What is the Smart Health Check report?
The performance of your Netezza system is impacted by a number of factors that will often not be apparent from the output of an individual command line utility like nzhealthcheck alone. Furthermore, the nzhealthcheck utility is not a feature of NPS for Cloud Pak for Data. We combine our 30+ years of experience supporting Netezza with additional diagnostics and analysis to determine not just what problems are lurking undetected, but also how to remedy them.
The report is not to be confused with the ICP4D Health Check that IBM offers, which is a series of commands that check the performance of OpenShift nodes, such as CPU and memory utilisation, and not the health of the Netezza database, which is what the Smart Healthcheck Report does.
The only difference between the two versions of the report is the way issues are reported. In the case of legacy Netezza appliances, the nzhealthcheck report provides advice against each issue, whereas for CP4D warnings and errors and generated without any advice on how to resolve the issue. We would be able to assist if you needed further analysis of any warnings and errors that are reported.
What does the report contain?
Your report will contain:
- Legacy systems:
- A system audit showing how up to date your software is across all 4 components of your Netezza system: Netezza Performance Server (NPS), Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Host Platform (HPF) and Firmware Diagnostics and Tools (FDT), with recommendations for remediation. This is crucial for ensuring that any future hardware problems will not be exacerbated by dated firmware, operating system, or database software.
- An analysis of any hardware issues identified with recommendations for remediation.
- An analysis of the health of your Netezza databases showing database groom state and skew.
- Insights into the performance of your system.
- CP4D systems:
- A system audit showing the versions of the various components of your system
- An analysis of the health of your Netezza databases showing database groom state and skew.
- Insights into the performance of your system.
How to get the report
It’s as simple as sending us some diagnostic output, which you can gather via an executable file that you can download here.
This executable file only collects system data such as database specifications (sizing, maintenance data, catalog information, etc.), hardware history and other system data files. It does not access your user data.
After downloading the file:
- Save the binary file to /export/home/nz
- Make it executable: chmod +x /export/home/nz /smartdsa.bin
- Run as root or nz user: /export/home/nz/smartdsa.bin
- Email the output to [freehealthcheck@smart.associates]
Your report will be emailed back to you.
In the meantime, if you have any questions, feel free to contact us.
