OneAgent support for Solaris LDOM

[jiri_kurejko]

Hi, I have a customer asking about Dynatrace support and licensing for Solaris SPARC virtualization. More specifically support for Zones and LDOMs. Are these supported? How are host units calculated? Based on the RAM allocated to the Zone/LDOM or the underlying machine?

[Bartek_Gatz]

Hi Jiri. The host units are always calculated for the memory that OneAgent detects. In case of Solaris, we provide only option to monitor Java and Apache. In this case OneAgent is only seeing the resources which are made available to the respective Java or Apache process. So in this case the host units will be calculated based on the configuration applied to these specific processes.

I hope this helps. Regards,

Bartek.

[Babar_Qayyum]

Hello @Bartosz G.

Please correct my understanding about your below explanation.

In this case OneAgent is only seeing the resources which are made available to the respective Java or Apache process.

Do you mean a VM/Zone has 32 GB memory but the process assigned only 16 GB memory, therefore, only one host agent will be counted with the licensing perspective?

Regards,

Babar

[larry_roberts]

Solaris monitoring is very limited. You will find this with just about all the vendors though. Solaris is frankly just a real pain in the neck when it comes to monitoring. A small tip to watch out for - If you have multiple zones on an LDOM, the Dyantrace licensing does not track memory correctly. Rather than seeing the total memory for the LDOM and having an understanding that all the zones on the LDOM are children of it sharing the memory, Dynatrace licensing counts each zone as having the full amount of memory of the LDOM. Keep watch over that so you're not getting hit on licensing that you truly are not consuming. Dynatrace I know is aware of it and last time I checked they were trying to figure out a way to track it correctly.

[Babar_Qayyum]

Hello @Larry R.

Thank you for your input. Due to licensing issue we were discussing with the Solaris team for the capping of each Zone/VM but they are not happily accepting this idea.
Do you have any latest update for the solution to this situation or can you share any road map where Dynatrace is updating the information?

Regards,

Babar

[larry_roberts]

You know what I know at this point 🙂 All I can tell you is that they have stated they are aware of the problem and are figuring out how to address it. Currently there is no real solution to it. Capping each zone I do not think would help with this as Dynatrace is looking at the LDOM memory every time it looks at a zone. This means even if you cap a zone, the zone will still show as the total amount of memory for which the LDOM has that it is running on.

For example:

If you have an LDOM with say 96GB of memory installed and let's say you have 3 zones running on it. Dynatrace is going to report that each zone has 96GB of memory meaning that it sees this as a total of 288GB rather than 96GB being shared between the 3 zones. Hope that makes sense 🙂

[Babar_Qayyum]

Hello @Larry R.

Thank you for sharing more information after a little bit stupid request to you 🙂
Now once again I will have to buck-up the customer to wait until problem is not fix because we have a limited license and maximum infrastructure is Solaris.

Regards,

Babar

[larry_roberts]

No question is ever stupid 🙂 Happy to help!

[patrick_thurner]

With v165 we introduced the capability to read the Memory Capping of a Solaris Zone, which then will be considred as memory limit and applies to Host-Unit calculation. This for sure only works in case the cap is set. Otherwise still the memory size of the global zone / LDOM is used for calculation

[larry_roberts]

This is exactly why it's not really a fix. We don't and I am sure other don't cap for the pure reason that the zones can share the memory. This needs a real fix.

[Babar_Qayyum]

Hello @Patrick T.

We exercised a capping on few zones which worked as expected. The challenging part in this to convince Solaris Team for capping. They have never capped zones until unless a zone was creating a problem for other zones.

How to overcome these challenges?

Regards,

Babar

[larry_roberts]

You nailed it. That is exactly my point as well. This is not really a fix for this issue.

[ruan_vanstaden]

Hi, Is there any indication when this issue will be addressed?

We are in the process of moving a large section of our applications to Oracle Solaris and we would like to keep using Dynatrace but if we can't better control our OneAgent license allocations we are going to have issues.

Is the only option still to cap the Zones?

[larry_roberts]

I would not count on it. We are trying to get over to Linux as fast as we can with the remaining Solaris servers we have left. I don't think Dynatrace plans to do anything more with Solaris in terms of features or enhancements including the way the licensing is tracked. If you are using Solaris, it is a HUGE PAIN.