Solaris monitoring tracks how Oracle Solaris hosts, LDOMs and zones use CPU, memory, network and disk. XorMon, open source under GPL v3, monitors Solaris Control Domains, LDOMs, Global Zones and Zones on SPARC and x86 with a Perl-based OS agent, and graphs CPU, memory, paging, LAN throughput, and disk throughput, IOPS and latency.

What does XorMon monitor on Oracle Solaris?

XorMon monitors four kinds of Oracle Solaris systems, LDOM, Control Domain, Global Zone and Zone, on SPARC and x86, and presents their data hierarchically.

The monitored metrics are CPU, memory utilization, paging, LAN throughput in MB/sec, disk throughput in MB/sec and in IOPS, and disk latency. In the XorMon list of hypervisors, Oracle VM Server for SPARC uses the Solaris CDOM/LDOM host as its data source, and Sun xVM Server (x86 Systems) uses the Solaris host. Release 2.3.0 added a summary page for each CDOM, LDOM and Zone.

Sources: Hypervisor monitoring, updated 2026-10-06, and Release notes 2.3.

How does the XorMon OS agent collect Solaris performance data?

A Perl-based OS agent, the LPAR2RRD agent, runs on each Solaris host from crontab every minute and sends its data to the XorMon server on TCP port 8162.

Connections are initiated from the monitored Solaris host only. The agent may run under any user account without special OS privileges; on an LDOM or CDOM, that user (xormon) needs the read right solaris.ldoms.read, checked with /sbin/ldm ls -p. There are three working modes: agents on Control Domains only give all CDOM data and a limited data set (CPU, memory, network) about all their LDOMs; agents on LDOMs and Global Zones bring more details about each LDOM; agents on Zones as well monitor every Zone from the OS point of view. Solaris boxes appear in the XorMon UI under the Solaris folder within an hour.

Sources: Solaris agent installation, updated 2026-10-13, and Agent monitoring summary, updated 2026-10-21.

Which Solaris commands and logs does the XorMon agent use?

The agent collects the Oracle Solaris error log from /var/adm/messages, and the agent release notes record work on the prstat command, on swap -lk and on SARMON.

XorMon presents error log messages of four severity levels: Emergency, Critical, Error and Alert. Error log collection was implemented in Solaris agent 8.51-1 and listed in XorMon release 2.4.0. Earlier agent releases fixed an issue with zones in the prstat command on Solaris 10, fixed swap -lk on Solaris 10, implemented the SARMON CPU queue, and extended SARMON with IOPS, MB/sec and latency.

Sources: Error log monitoring, updated 2026-10-19, Agent release notes, and Release notes 2.4.

Which additional OS metrics and alerts does XorMon offer for Solaris?

The OS agent adds OS CPU, CPU queue, JOB, memory, LAN, SAN, paging and filesystem metrics and Memory Pools, and XorMon alerting can use any metric the tool collects.

The additional metrics are CPU sys, user and IO wait; load average and blocked processes; CPU and memory per JOB; used memory and FS cache; LAN MB/sec and packet count; SAN MB/sec, packets/sec and latency; paging space usage in % and paging rate in MB/sec; and filesystem usage in % and GB. A single alerting rule can cover selected filesystems or all filesystems on all monitored VMs. Ping alerting supports Solaris through the OS agent, with results under Dashboard, Health Status, Ping.

Sources: Filesystem monitoring, updated 2026-06-19, Alerting, updated 2026-10-13, and Ping alerting, updated 2026-09-17.

Key points

• Monitors Control Domains, LDOMs, Global Zones and Zones on Oracle Solaris SPARC and x86.
• Perl-based OS agent started from crontab every minute, connecting to the XorMon server on TCP port 8162.
• Graphs CPU, memory, paging, LAN throughput, and disk throughput, IOPS and latency.
• Error log from /var/adm/messages, filesystem usage, JOB and Memory Pools through the OS agent.
• Alerts on any collected metric and ping checks, free open source license (GPL v3).

Solaris monitored systems, agent and examples

XorMon does performance monitoring for Oracle Solaris boxes with graphical presentation.
It is aware of Oracle Solaris Sparc and x86 virtualization. It presents data hierarchically.
The agent supports Solaris 6+.

Monitored systems:

• LDOM
• Control Domain
• Global Zone
• Zone

Working modes

1. install OS agents on Control Domain (CDOM) only
2. install OS agents on all CDOMs, LDOMs and Global Zones only
3. Install OS agents on all CDOMs, LDOMs, Global Zones and Zones

Monitored metrics

• CPU
• Memory utilization
• Paging
• LAN throughput MB/sec
• Disk throughput MB/sec
• Disk throughput IOPS
• Disk latency

Implementation

There is XorMon daemon listening on the host where XorMon server is running on port 8162.
Each LPAR has a Perl-based agent installed. This agent is started every minute from the crontab and retrieves performance and other data.
The agent contacts the XorMon server every 10-15 minutes and sends all locally stored data for that period.

Agent prerequisites

• Perl interpreter. All Unix/Linux systems contain Perl in basic installation.
• It may run under any user account, it does not need any special privileges in the OS.
• Opened TCP communication between each LPAR and XorMon server on port 8162.
• Connections are initiated from the monitored Solaris host only.

Collected data set can be enhanced about OS agent which brings these additional metrics:

Examples

Memory:

Filesystem:

Multipath:

Last updated: 2026-10-31