topic Re: kcalarm in Operating System - HP-UX

kcalarm

KPS — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:50:56 GMT

We've recently discovered kcalarm here and we see some really good benefits of using it to track kernel tunable usage and potentially having it alert us when indicated thresholds are reached.

The question I have is in regard to overhead on the system. Would anyone happen to know if there is any system resource overhead that would be associated to running kcalarm?

Thanks,
/KPS

Re: kcalarm

Rita C Workman — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:05:28 GMT

You may want to see if the process is actually already "on".
To check this run:
kcalarm -m status

To list what it shows run:
kcalarm -l

If it's on, you may find number of parms listed, but no alarm is actually set. To make use of this and see how much resources it takes on your box, put an alarm on one and watch it. It really depends on how much you set up to monitor.

Regards,
Rita

Re: kcalarm

KPS — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:37:39 GMT

We have kclarm enabled with the following parameters set:

#kcalarm
Tunable Status Thres Int Event Type(s) Notification
--------------- ------- ----- --- ------------- ------------------------------
any on 90% 5 ini email:root@`hostname`@emailaddress.com:

Re: kcalarm

Wim Rombauts — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 06:55:53 GMT

According to the manpage of kcalarm, alarms are implemented using kcmond;

We have 2 alarms : An alarm on 75% usage, and another alarm on 90% usage.

When I look at kcmond, our server has an uptime of 69 days with 15'26" CPU usage of kcmond.
I don't think that is a significant load on the system.

Re: kcalarm

KPS — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:02:14 GMT

Thanks for that tip of monitoring kcmond. That sounds like the best thing to do on this side is to monitor the kcmond daemon with glance or top and see how having one or more alarms impacts us.

From the sounds of it, there seems to be very minimal cpu usage though.

Many thanks for the responses, points assigned.

/KPS