topic Re: Have you heard of collectl yet? in Operating System - Linux

Have you heard of collectl yet?

Mark Seger — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 21:31:46 GMT

About 5+ years ago I wrote a performance monitoring tool for linux systems based on the highly successful 'collect' tool for Tru64, so naturally the name "collect for linux" seemed like a natural, or collectl for short. Initially is was pretty much used for internal testing and benchmarking, but soon made it into the SFS and XC product stacks, particularly because of its support for HPC technologies such as Infiniband and Lustre.

To cut to the chase I open-sourced it about a year ago at http://collectl.sourceforge.net/ and a couple of weeks ago it was added into the fedora distribution. It has a whole slew of feature that you can read about on the 'features' page.

My goal was to try and take the best ideas from most tools and then add some of my own on top of that and I think what I ended up with is pretty useful. So take it for a spin and don't be bashful about asking for help as I'm always looking to make it better and easier to use.

-mark

Re: Have you heard of collectl yet?

Oviwan — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 11:34:28 GMT

Hey

Thanks for share this. I will check it out. I think it'ss something similar to nmon?
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-analyze_aix/

Regards

Re: Have you heard of collectl yet?

Ivan Ferreira — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 12:30:12 GMT

Collectl is a great tool, I been using it since I found it a long time ago.

The only thing that I would add is collectl -sp, as it available in Tru64, to sample process that where executed in that moment.

Re: Have you heard of collectl yet?

Mark Seger — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 20:58:53 GMT

Not sure what you mean about monitoring processes. Collectl has had that capability since day 1 (maybe you got lost in all the switches like so many other people). Actually to monitor processes you need to do -sZ (at the time I was using -sp to monitor partitions and so 'p' wasn't available).

With -sZ not only can you monitor processes, you can see threads, I/O If you run "collectl --top" you'll see top processes (not really a big deal since top will already do that) but if you do "collectl --top io --procots t", you'll see the list of top processes including threaded ones! only thing is your kernel will need to support reporting process I/O.

-mark

Re: Have you heard of collectl yet?

Mark Seger — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 21:03:18 GMT

I almost forgot, you can actually mix other types of subsystems with --top, so if you do "collectl --top -scdn", you'll not only see top processes you also see a scrolling window that shows cpu, disk and network traffic. Naturally you can use any subsystems you like in the request. There's a lot more info on process monitoring at: http://collectl.sourceforge.net/Process.html
-mark

Re: Have you heard of collectl yet?

Ivan Ferreira — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 03:03:37 GMT

Having that information, I just have to say that it's the best tool from my point of view. Thank you Mark.

I will add to my "performance" Linux course ;).

Re: Have you heard of collectl yet?

Mark Seger — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 11:28:55 GMT

Glad you're enjoying it. You (and others) might also be interested in the current version I'm working on. I'm adding support for monitoring fan/temp data using ipmi! Every wonder what -sE does or why there are actually 3 different monitoring intervals? This has been in the original version and never did anything but I'm hoping that now it will now.

I'm experimenting with reading fan/temp data with 'ipmitool' and while the output from different systems varies, I have a pretty general parsing algorithm that looks promising, but as new systems become available their formats will possibly be different and may break collectl. My current design will allow users to write their own rules to deal with the different formats, but it remains to be seen how workable that will be.

If anyone is interested in trying out a pre-release copy let me know but I do have to warn you it IS experimental and could very well change. Just be forewarned, this will require you have ipmitool installed and operational and if things get too complex I may have to drop the feature in a future release.

-mark

Re: Have you heard of collectl yet?

SJO EGGER — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 11:01:51 GMT

thankÂ´s mark!

iÂ´m from the tru64 world and missed this tool over-all.

Re: Have you heard of collectl yet?

Ivan Ferreira — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 13:51:06 GMT

Please let me know when you port it to Solaris ;)

Re: Have you heard of collectl yet?

Deepak Kr — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 11:27:25 GMT

Hi,

Thanks for this info.

is this also available for HP-UX???

Re: Have you heard of collectl yet?

Mark Seger — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 15:07:33 GMT

No plans for anything other than linux. sorry...
-mark

Re: Have you heard of collectl yet?

Court Campbell — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 11:57:37 GMT

>> is this also available for HP-UX???

Maybe when HPUX adds procfs and sysfs.

Re: Have you heard of collectl yet?

Ciro Iriarte — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:23:02 GMT

Hi, i've added collectl to Opensuse BuildService. Currently it only build packages for SLES and RHEL (using the stock spec file), but the OBS supports building for Mandriva, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and Opensuse also.

So with some work it can be the supported packages can be extended and we can request to move the package to a official repository (outside my home)

Re: Have you heard of collectl yet?

Ciro Iriarte — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:24:15 GMT

Link: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/ciriarte:/collectl/

Re: Have you heard of collectl yet?

Mark Seger — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:00:28 GMT

If anyone is interested, I just released a new version the other day
-mark