topic Re: perfomance monitoring database? in Operating System - HP-UX

perfomance monitoring database?

Donny Jekels — Wed, 23 Apr 2003 12:06:22 GMT

I posted this question in the sys admin side. needless to say I got "zero" reponses.

I am planning on building a tool to collect performance stats from all our unix servers 80+ and send this data to a RDBMS database.

Does anyone know of a freeware verion I could use to get started, or any ideas of how to get started would be welcome.

Thanks
Donny

Re: perfomance monitoring database?

Zafar A. Mohammed_1 — Wed, 23 Apr 2003 12:21:00 GMT

Will you be more specific about Performance Stats, I mean its UNIX performance or Database Performance?

Thanks
Zafar

Re: perfomance monitoring database?

Paula J Frazer-Campbell — Wed, 23 Apr 2003 12:40:30 GMT

Hi

I would suggest sar - pushing its outputs to files which you then ftp to the collection server.

Search the forum for use and setup of sar.

HTH
Paula

Re: perfomance monitoring database?

Paddy_1 — Wed, 23 Apr 2003 13:03:55 GMT

Measureware is the solution but its not free.
You can write your own scripts to process this and write SQL scripts to push into the DB

Re: perfomance monitoring database?

John Poff — Wed, 23 Apr 2003 13:08:17 GMT

Hi,

We do it here, but we use Measureware to get the performance stats. The Measureware product costs money, but it is worth it many times over for the amount of information it will give you.

If you are looking to do it for free, you'll just have to use sar, dump it to a file and write a script to send it to your database. Not too hard, but the stats won't be nearly as good.

JP

Re: perfomance monitoring database?

Martin Johnson — Wed, 23 Apr 2003 13:53:10 GMT

I would agree that MeasureWare (MWA) is the way to go. MWA monitors hundreds of metrics and MWA can be set to alert on these metrics when they reach a certain threshold.

The ability to monitor the system tables has been very valuable to me in preventing downtime.

HTH
Marty

Re: perfomance monitoring database?

Donny Jekels — Wed, 23 Apr 2003 14:02:12 GMT

UNIX perf data

Re: perfomance monitoring database?

Zafar A. Mohammed_1 — Wed, 23 Apr 2003 14:58:41 GMT

UNIX Performace stats to RDBMS.

Example
UNIX File:
tdate=`date +%m-%d-%Y.%H:%M:%S`
iostat | ssp | rmnl | sed '1d' | awk -v td=$tdate '{print td "|" $1 "|" $2 "|"$3 " |" $4 "|"}' > /tmp/ios.out

If you have informix database then
dbaccess database_name
create table iostats
(
dtime char(50),
devices char(50),
bps integer,
sps decimal(10,2),
msps decimal(10,2)
);

LOAD FROM "/tmp/ios.out" DELIMITER "|"
INSERT INTO iostats;

Now, just select from informix database:
SELECT * FROM iostats

You can do the same like this with Oracle also, but the loading syntax will be different.

Thanks
Zafar

Re: perfomance monitoring database?

Donny Jekels — Wed, 23 Apr 2003 16:19:10 GMT

Zafar,

Yes is exactly, what I am trying to develop.
I have an oracle database, have not built the database yet.

I am sure measureware can already do this type of work. but I plan to build a web front for the data with perl cgi scripts. and be able to do trending afterwards, and forcasting.

Thus I will start with cpu stats 1st, then add each component to monitor one at a time.

thanks
Donny

Re: perfomance monitoring database?

Bill Hassell — Wed, 23 Apr 2003 16:43:07 GMT

The (very) hard way to do this is to use classic (and aging) Unix tools such as top and vmstat and sar, then try to create meaningful reports. This will require an enormous amount of labor and time to produce useful reports as the tools were never designed to handle threaded apps, massive memory requirements, multiple CPUs, etc.

MeasureWare interfaces with special metric points inside HP-UX and gathers them through a specialized shared memory daemon called midaemon. This interface is quite non-invasive yet provides 100x more in measurements than the legacy Unix apps. The important feature for MWA is the extract command that will pull exactly what you need from the logs. HP also offers PerfView which will create graphs but for your application (web based reports), just MWA and extract will work very well.
b
Buy a copy of MWA and look for the presentation software in the freeware community--you'll save an enormous amount of time and labor plus get useful reports.

There are also two alternatives to MeasureWare: SarCheck and MetaView from Lund Performance Solutions. The Lund package is complete with web (and also PDA) reports along with alarms and drill-down capability. If you need to manage 80+ servers, you'll be way ahead using the Lund package which comes out of the box ready to serve up the reports.