Monitor resource usage

[owilliams]

Can anyone tell me a way to do live monitoring of resource usage? I need to test our systems ability to handle several large processes concurrently. I want to get the best overall statistic possible.
New to VMS thanks for the assistance.

[Heinz W Genhart · Accepted solution]

Hi owilliams

OpenVMS knows the Monitor Utility
For starting use

$ MONITOR ALL,DISK/ITEM=ALL

With

$ HELP MONITOR you will receive further informations

Another very good tool is T4. It's downloadable from HP's hoempage

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/OpenVMS/products/t4/index.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

Regards

Geni

[Andy Bustamante]

I'll second T4 as the way to collect system information. You can also extend T4 to collect custom statistics for your site and application.

You may also want to look at Availability Manager, http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/products/availman/index.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN. Very useful to review real time information. Presently there is no logging.

The Performance Data Collector, http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/products/tdc/index.html and ECP http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/products/ecp/index.html both collect simliar information to T4, you'll need an X-Windows display to review reporting.

Andy Bustamante

[owilliams]

Will this work for version 7.2-2?

[Robert Gezelter]

owilliams,

I agree with the use of T4 to process the statistics. T4 actually has two components, a component to collect data and a series of tools to allow graphic analysis of the resulting files.

You do not mention what version of OpenVMS is being run. In any event, if T4's collectors cannot be installed, the MONITOR utility can be used to collect data for later analysis (I recently needed to do this for a client with an older system).

Monitoring resource usage is only the first step in the process. Often, achieving better performance is not so much a question of adding resources as it is of using the existing resources in a more efficient fashion.

There is also an excellent article entitled "TimeLine-Driven Collaboration with "T4 & Friends": A Time-saving Approach to OpenVMS Performance" (available at http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/journal/v3/t4.html ) by Steve Lieman (formerly of the OpenVMS Performance Group; now in private practice at Trendsthatmatter, http://www.trendsthatmatter.com ).

Depending upon the inhouse expertise available, it may be sound to retain outside expertise more familiar with the interactions of various strategies and settings (Disclosure: My firm provides consulting services in this area, as do several other prominent contributors to this forum).

- Bob Gezelter, http://www.rlgsc.com

[Robert Gezelter]

owilliams,

The kit will install on 7.3-1 and up (according to the documentation on the T4 page at http://h71000.www7.hp.com/OpenVMS/products/t4/index.html ).

However, as I observed earlier, it is straightforward on earlier versions to run MONITOR directly from a batch job to produce a series of data files that can then be processed through T4.

- Bob Gezelter, http://www.rlgsc.com

[owilliams]

Is there a way to closely follow a particular process? Whats happening is we are extracting large amounts of data and formating it into flat text files.

[Ian Miller.]

For real time monitoring of one process then Availability Manager is good.

For recording data to look at later - You can extract data for individual processes in T4 (Buffered i/O rate, CPUtim, direct I/O rate, pagesgbl, pagesprocess, page faults)

For VMS V7.2-2 you could do your own processing of data collected by monitor (this is what T4 does).