Shield Adds Task Automation To Message Monitoring Tool
March 17, 2025 Alex Woodie
Automating the monitoring of IBM i messages was just the start for Shield Advanced Solutions and its AAG offering. This month, the company announced that the Nagios-based tool has been bolstered with support for Ansible, which gives it the capability to automatically respond and take actions based on certain IBM i messages.
Shield Advanced Solutions launched AAG, which stands for At-A-Glance, back in 2023 as a way to help its customers monitor high availably setups. Shield President Chris Hird was aghast that some IBM i shops were leaving mirrored pairs under monitored, which reduced the odds the systems would be available in an actual emergency.
Hird selected the open source Nagios framework, which was first created in 2002 to monitor Linux servers, as the basis for the new solution. In addition to a Web-based AAG dashboard, Hird also developed NG4i (or Nagios for i), an IBM i-based plug-in for the Nagios framework that continuously monitored more than 130 important metrics on the IBM i. Shield has since expanded AAG to continuously check nearly 155 metrics on IBM i.
With its March 2025 update, Hird has made a big change: the addition of Ansible automation to the AAG solution. Ansible is an open source package designed to automate various administrative tasks, such as configuring operating systems and deploying applications, through playbooks based on YAML. It was originally developed in 2012 to enable remote administration of Linux servers in an agent-less manner, but over time, the software’s capabilities have widened considerably to automate tasks on other operating systems through various add-on “modules.”
IBM and Red Hat worked to bring Ansible to IBM i in 2020 with a few dozen modules for the midrange OS, such as copying a save file, fetching objects, and running CL scripts. It added a dozen or so more modules, such as configuring Db2 Mirror, in 2021, an then in 2022, IBM launched an official version of the product called Ansible Automation Platform for Power.
By adding Ansible to its Nagios-based AAG offering, Shield is enabling IBM i customers to automate the execution of certain actions in response to the conditions detected by Nagios and AAG. Customers can use the software to create custom remediation tasks that are tailored to their specific needs, thereby keeping their IBM i systems running well.
How does this integration work its magic? Hird explains.
“Our monitoring product is configured to communicate with Ansible’s control node, allowing us to trigger playbooks based on predefined conditions,” he says in a statement accompanying the announcement. “For instance, when the system detects a critical threshold breach or an unauthorized device, it automatically initiates an Ansible playbook to rectify the issue. Ansible can also restart jobs which are found to not be running, and even send PTF orders to download any PTFs missing on the system.”
Ansible could even be used to automate the downloading and installation of product license keys, which Hird walks us through in his March 5 blog post.
“Keep your eyes on this space as this is just the beginning for AAG,” Hird writes. “We will always continue to improve and add features.”
AAG runs on Linux. Customers must provide their own Linux server, or they can purchase a Raspberry Pi through Shield. AAG is available at a starting price of $50 per month. See the company’s website at www.shieldadvanced.com for more information.
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