Automating AIX Recovery With Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Zabbix

Andy Wojnarek of ATS Group explains how AIX teams integrate Zabbix with Red Hat Ansible Automation and Event-Driven Ansible to automate filesystem recovery, performance tuning and adapter reconfiguration

Balancing uptime, performance and resource efficiency can be challenging for IT teams managing IBM Power systems and AIX environments. Many AIX administrators are still encumbered by outdated scripts and manual processes that diminish productivity and create opportunities for inconsistency and error.

In recent years, organizations have increasingly focused on integrating automation and real-time monitoring through Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (including Event-Driven Ansible) and Zabbix. This article explores real use cases and demonstrates how combining these technologies can lead to faster remediation, reduced downtime and more consistent AIX operations.

From Reactive to Proactive: Why Automate AIX?

Engineers in the IBM POWER space often rely too heavily on legacy scripts or manual processes for handling standard tasks, such as user setup, performance tuning, filesystem growth and more. Ansible addresses this issue by providing human-readable, reusable playbooks that execute consistently across various environments. With the IBM AIX and PowerVM collections, Ansible offers out-of-the-box content for managing LPARs, tuning performance parameters, handling firmware updates and more.

Using the Ansible Automation Platform (AAP), teams gain a centralized interface to manage these playbooks and integrate inventory, version control and approvals. This provides a level of control and visibility that standalone scripts cannot offer.

Event-Driven Ansible: Automation That Listens

Event-Driven Ansible (EDA), a component of the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, adds an additional layer, enabling your automation environment to react in real-time to events from your infrastructure. Instead of a user manually launching a playbook, EDA monitors for specific conditions (like a full filesystem or a misconfigured tunable) and triggers the appropriate automation playbook to resolve the issue.

EDA operates by ingesting events—typically through webhooks—and programmatically assessing rulebooks that dictate which action to take. These rulebooks correlate event types with corrective actions, such as adjusting a parameter or expanding storage.

Integrating with Zabbix for Real-Time Monitoring

To make EDA truly valuable, you need high-quality, real-time telemetry. Zabbix delivers this with exceptional granularity and flexibility, tracking file system utilization, network performance, adapter configurations and much more.

The integration looks like this:

• Zabbix detects a critical condition (e.g., a file system exceeds 98% utilization)
• It pushes a JSON event to EDA
• EDA evaluates the rulebook and triggers the matching Ansible playbook
• Ansible increases the filesystem size via AIX APIs
• The alert is cleared—all within 30 seconds, with no human intervention

Use Case 1: Auto-Tuning Network Performance

In one demonstration, a junior admin inadvertently changed a TCP tunable, which degraded performance. Zabbix detected the change within a minute, EDA identified the mismatch and Ansible automatically corrected the value, restoring optimal settings in under 20 seconds.

This is especially useful for integrating your “best practices” into your monitoring and automation ecosystem. Monitoring your tunables and automatically adjusting when you deviate from them is a high-value, low-effort activity.

Use Case 2: Automated Filesystem Expansion

When a monitored AIX LPAR reached critical filesystem usage, Zabbix triggered an alert. EDA launched a playbook that verified free space in the volume group and expanded the file system. The system stabilized before any user impact occurred.

Reduce the need to get engineers out of bed for routine problems that occur in the middle of the night to save money and time.

Use Case 3: Safe Adapter Reconfiguration

For more complex scenarios—like tuning fibre channel adapter parameters—Ansible can validate redundancy, safely reconfigure the adapter and restore it without disruption. These tasks, which are risky and time-consuming for humans, have become efficient and safe with automation.

What This Means for AIX Engineers

This approach bridges observability and automation, allowing teams to:

• Proactively resolve issues before end users are affected
• Standardize operations across LPARs
• Reduce dependency on tribal knowledge and ad hoc scripting
• Free up engineers to focus on strategic improvements rather than firefighting

Most importantly, these capabilities are accessible. EDA is included with AAP, making it accessible to many teams without additional investment. Further, Zabbix is affordable and open-source. Many organizations already possess what they need to begin.

Final Thoughts

The convergence of monitoring and automation is no longer aspirational—it’s practical, proven and here. Organizations using AIX can take meaningful steps toward operational excellence by integrating Zabbix with Ansible.

Whether the pain point involves midnight alerts, inconsistent configurations or time-consuming manual tasks, there’s a better way. Begin with one use case, automate the solution, and then scale. The outcome is a more resilient, responsive and modern AIX environment.

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