topic Re: Monitoring System Calls................... in Operating System - HP-UX

Monitoring System Calls...................

R.M.PANDIAN — Mon, 22 Oct 2001 02:41:51 GMT

Hi,

Using Measureware, is there a way to capture the name the sytem calls and their rates?. I could not find a metric for that.

I can monitor the number of system calls in global metrics.

I know Glance has the capability to monitor the name and the rate of system calls.

Can measureware capture it??

Re: Monitoring System Calls...................

T G Manikandan — Mon, 22 Oct 2001 02:54:25 GMT

Hello,
I went through the measureware metric files.
I captured these two metrics

PROC_CPU_SYSCALL_UTIL
PROC_CPU_SYSCALL_TIME

Re: Monitoring System Calls...................

T G Manikandan — Mon, 22 Oct 2001 02:57:24 GMT

Hello,
i also found the below metrics
GBL_CPU_SYSCALL_UTIL
GBL_CPU_NORMAL_UTIL
GBL_SYSCALL_RATE

Re: Monitoring System Calls...................

Sridhar Bhaskarla — Mon, 22 Oct 2001 03:14:45 GMT

Pandian,

I am afraid you can capture that information through Measureware. You can find all the metrics that can be captured in /var/opt/perf/reptall. Capturing all the systems called related to a particular process would be too much to collect. Just try capturing them using tusc or trace for five mintutes, you will see the size of the log file. If you really need to troubleshoot, you need to use either tusc or trace depending on the OS version.

-Sri

Re: Monitoring System Calls...................

R.M.PANDIAN — Mon, 22 Oct 2001 04:14:05 GMT

TGM,

None of the metrics that u suggested records the name of the system calls.

Sri,

I went through all metrics of Measureware, none of them refers to capturing the names of the system calls used on a system wide basis.

Glance Plus is able to report the name of the systems calls executed on a online basis.

trace or like utilities reports the stats for a specific process. I need the system wide stats.

My requirement is that I need to be able to record the Name of the system calls and the rate at which they are being used by the processes on a system wide basis (Global).

Any suggestions?

- Pandian

Re: Monitoring System Calls...................

Santosh Nair_1 — Mon, 22 Oct 2001 07:56:00 GMT

HP has a new tool (not sure if its supported or not) called Prospect which does exactly what you're looking to do. It only works on 11.x though. Although I have to warn you, it will generate lots of data, especially if you're looking to monitor system calls globally.

ftp://ftp.cup.hp.com/dist/networking/tools/prospect/

Hope this helps.

-Santosh

Re: Monitoring System Calls...................

Mladen Despic — Tue, 23 Oct 2001 03:51:33 GMT

Hi Pandian,

You can use Glance in "adviser only" mode to capture data in a log file. You just need to create "adviser syntax" containing the metrics that you want to capture. For example, save this to a file, called syscalls.syntax in your current directory:

/Begin/

PRINT "=============================="
PRINT " ", gbl_stattime, " "
PRINT "=============================="
SYSTEMCALL LOOP
PRINT syscall_call_name|12, " ", syscall_call_rate

/End/

Then run:

glance -adviser_only -syntax syscalls.syntax -j 60

You can check glance man pages for more command line options. Also, the document /opt/perf/paperdocs/gp/C/adviser.pdf contains a more interesting example that uses systemcall loop. More adviser syntax examples are available under a subdirectory of /opt/perf/examples.

Can Measureware capture this?

Well, not directly, but if you use Measureware DSI logs, you can collect any Glance metrics to a particular type of a log file which can then be analyzed by Measureware tools, PerfView, etc. For more information, see the document /opt/perf/paperdocs/mwa/C/mwadsi.pdf .
Before reading any of these documents in depth, I would highly recommend the following:

http://devresource.hp.com/devresource/Docs/TechPapers/PakPerform.pdf

I hope this is helpful.

Regards ... Mladen

Re: Monitoring System Calls...................

Mladen Despic — Tue, 23 Oct 2001 04:00:51 GMT

It looks like the above link is outdated. Here is the current one:

http://h21007.www2.hp.com/dspp/files/unprotected/PakPerform.pdf