topic Re: Closest equivalent to collect in HP-UX, as I am using it. in Operating System - HP-UX

Closest equivalent to collect in HP-UX, as I am using it.

Paul Maglinger — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 15:50:01 GMT

Migrating from Tru64 to HP-UX. While running Tru64 I was running "collect" from cron to monitor and create a history of system performance that I could go back to if we noticed problems using collgui and narrow down the time and processes that were running at that time. The script I run every night at midnight is:

############################################
# Script to run collect for 23 hours and 50 minutes
# and save to /user02/collect/ directory

hour=`date +%H`

today=`date +%a%b%d`

/usr/sbin/collect -R 23h50m -i 30 -f /user02/collect/Castor_collect_${today}_${hour}
##############################################

I'm wanting to do the same thing in HP-UX that is, collect system information throughout the day including cpu and memory utilization of processes and then be able to go back over that and find the processes that are eating up my resources. Collgui was a nice GUI that allowed me to narrow down searches and even created graphs of the selected time periods.

I have found no less than 5 performance monitoring tools from HP:
Glance (GlancePlus)
MeasureWare
Perfview
Caliper
Sar

None of these seem to be the all-inclusive package that collect (and collgui) was. Based on the way I was using collect and collgui, I would like the recommendations of the forums of what would be the most likely substitute in HP-UX.

Re: Closest equivalent to collect in HP-UX, as I am using it.

Patrick Wallek — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 16:27:02 GMT

GlancePlus is good for real time performance monitoring.

Measureware is probably the closest to what collect is, at least from what you describe (I have no VMS experience). It will monitor your system and store the data.

Perfview lets you look at the data collected via Measureware in a GUI. This could be somewhat equivalent to the collgui you describe.

Caliper - I have no experience with.

SAR - free with HP-UX, but has limited data storage ability and it can be difficult to pick out what you want. If you want sar data archived for more than a month, it must be done manually.

There is a bundle known as "GlancePlus Pak" that includes Glance and Measureware. I believe Perfview must be purchased separately.

Re: Closest equivalent to collect in HP-UX, as I am using it.

Hein van den Heuvel — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 16:33:27 GMT

Looks like you did your homework.

I suspect you'll end up with SAR, hopefully finding an existing tool to make it more pretty/useful.

The Tru64 Collect/collgui stuff was pretty good.
I asked Rob Urban (The writer) a few years back for alternate feeds. He wrote: "I can remember that at least one person hacked collgui to work with the ASCII output of collect, as opposed to the binary files. I believe it ran/runs on linux."

I suppose you could try to feed it HPUX data.
But considering the (non-)support for Colgui, that's not a great idea.

I would urge you to look at 'T4'.
Yeah it has OpenVMS written all over it, but it's visualizer TlVIZ and support tool CSVPNG are platform indepent and pretty darn handy.
It is free and available from the HP / OpenVMS.website.
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/products/t4/index.html

You may want to try it on an existing CGZ file for comparison with CollGUI
Attached a perl script to do the transformation collect -p .cgz --> csv
It is not fast. A minute CPU or so for a day worth of compress collect (9MB) to 1MB of uncompressed CSV, which TlViz takes 10 seconds or so to read.

If you decided to try that tool, be sure to
- modify Item list - drop items with zero values
- open up multiple files (compare Monday this week with Monday last week),
- hit the 'correlate' button and the 'moving average' toggle.

See also a recent topic:
http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1311399

Hope this helps some,
Hein van den Heuvel
HvdH Performance Consulting.

Re: Closest equivalent to collect in HP-UX, as I am using it.

Avinash20 — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 16:47:31 GMT

I believe GlancePlus and Measureware are the tools which I like,

I even have the above tools in most of our production setup to analyse the performance issue

http://h30097.www3.hp.com/docs/porting/interop/interop.pdf

Please refer to page-81 which talk about True-64 and HP-UX tools

You could go for:
The HP OpenView Performance Agent for UNIX, previously the HP OpenView MeasureWare Agent for
UNIX, captures performance, resource, and transaction data from HP 9000 series servers. Using minimal
system resources, the software continuously collects, logs, summarizes, and time stamps resource and
performance measurement data from applications, databases, networks and operating systems.
HP PerfView is an analysis tool that lets you examine data from the HP OpenView Performance Agent for
UNIX.

PS: Assign point if you find your answers

Re: Closest equivalent to collect in HP-UX, as I am using it.

Emil Velez — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 01:05:48 GMT

Welcome to the HPUX environment.

Probably about 70-80% of the HPUX systems purchased include a Operating Environment that includes Glance Plus Pak which is glance plus and a measureware agent.

Glance and measureware is available on other Operating systems like solaris, linux, aix and measureware is also availble on windows.

Glance displays about 1500 metrics with updates as quickly as 5seconds or so.

Measureware collects global, process, group of process, disk, filesystem, netif, logical volume related data every 5 minutes (process data every 1 minute). It collects about 400 metrics in various binary log files.

You can configure in a file /var/opt/perf/parm how much data is collected and retained. in the /var/opt/perf/alarmdef you can configure alarms with snmp traps, logs or run OS commands when thresholds are reached.

measureware data can be graphed by
Performance Manager or Performance Insight
all add on ($$) HP Software products but measureware data can be viewed in ascii or wks using a command called extract which can be used to create elaborate reports.

The perfview product is obsolete and replaced by Performance Manager

caliper is for programs
sar is available on all unix systems.

Re: Closest equivalent to collect in HP-UX, as I am using it.

Paul Maglinger — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 20:37:22 GMT

Thanks for the opinions!