ECP vs T4

[Garry Fruth]

I'm looking at these two products to gather data to find long-term trends and perform capacity planning. I'm looking for opinions about why one should be used over another. Or are both necessary to get a complete picture. I have used DECps elsewhere (aka pcpa aka Unicenter TNG performance ...). I have also used t4 elsewhere. But I don't have any experience with ECP.

[Ian Miller. · Accepted solution]

I use them for different things. ECP can get you overview graphs and a report very simply.
T4 is better at detail but I have trouble getting long term high level trends from it.

I would go for ECP. You can extract CSV data from ECP to load into excel to plot yr own graphs if you don't like the ones it does.
perfcap.com do a capacity planner product that uses ECP data.

[labadie_1]

see a tool to display T4 stats at

http://vmspython.dyndns.org/cgiplus-bin/t4

You can have the result as
- line
- area stacked
- spreadsheet

You may notice, when looking at the MON MODES items, that a lucky guy had a good number of CPU to play with :-) ...

Ah, you will need Python for Vms, which is on the same site

[Karl Rohwedder]

Attendees of the TUD meetings received a CD containing an internal tool TLVIZ to visualize, correlate, print... the CSV data generated by T4.

[Martin Vorlaender]

The graphs in Steve Lieman's article about T4 and friends in the OpenVMS Technical Journal V3 ( http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/journal/v3/t4.html ) were also created using TLviz.

cu,
Martin

[Ian Miller.]

There are various tools to display graphs for T4 data however for looking at long term trends I find ECP easier. T4 data needs reducing if you want to say look at total CPU utilisation over the last month or six. T4 is good for detail. Gary wants long-term trends and capacity planing. If you have the disk space run both.

[Wolfgang Burger]

There exists another option for collecting performance data and capacity anlysis - called PerfDat. This performance solution, developed by HP, provides more detailed statistics as you will get from ECP, T4 or DECps. One of the main components of the solution is the so called auto-trend engine for capacity analysis. Once customized there is no need of any further data management activities to get the long time trends.

PerfDat provides many advanced data analysis and data management features which make life easier in the context of reducuing data analysis time and getting rid of manual data management activities, even if you are monitoring big environments (50+ nodes).

If you want to get more infos about PerfDat, please contact PERFDAT@HP.COM

[Garry Fruth]

Thanks for the feedback; it was very helpful. For the time being, we decided to install ECP. My experience with T4 does lead me to believe it is more useful for looking at detail data rather than looking at trends. I look forward to seeing what ECP can do. I am also look into PERFDAT.

I will leave this thread open a bit longer so that others may add to the discussion for posterity. I will likely add feedback after I get a chance to try ECP.

[Ian Miller.]

I found a presentation by Wolfgang on perfdat - looks impressive - another fine piece of work from hp.
http://www.hp.cz/sw/ovms/pdf/performancemanagement_perfdat.pdf

I see that its sold as a service not as a product.

[Shael Richmond]

We use PAWZ by Perfcap. They are ex-Compaq people.

The data collectors work on multiple OS's and the server runs on Windows. I collect data from 60+ nodes with it.