OpenVMS Monthly Uptime Report

[labadie_1]

This product was a Dec product, has been sold to CA, and renamed Advise IT I think.

See

http://www3.ca.com/Solutions/Product.asp?ID=1174

regards


Géra

[Dante_5]

Thanks!

[Hein van den Heuvel]

>> The most difficult part is to calculate the uptime for a calendar month, let's day, May 1st at 00:00 to May 31st 23:59.

Correct. This has always been tricky.

But it got better in VMS V7.3-2 when a new lexical function F$DELTA_TIME was added.


Regular readers here will know I would now propose a 'perl' alternative, but it is a little tricky there also as there is no easy time-string to epoch-seconds function (or at least not that I can find today)
I would check out "vms_date_to_unix_epoch" in:
http://search.cpan.org/~dsugal/vms-misc-1_01/misc.pm

You also may want to look around in Openvms.org. It caries several interesting articles in the space for example:

http://dcl.openvms.org/stories.php?story=03/08/04/4042059


Hein.

[Dante_5]

Stephen:

Do you know if HP has another tool like "Local Availability Reporter", but one that can work on VAX ?
LAR only works in Alpha architecture. Maybe there could be an old tool from DEC.

If anybody of you know about this, would really be appreciated.
Thanks
Dante

[Martin P.J. Zinser]

Hello Dante,

instead of Advise IT you could run T4 on your nodes. Same principle, data for any downtime will be missing from your collected data. T4 is free, so there is quite a price differential to the CA product.

OTOH, if all you are interested in is "uptime" a simple script that updates an RMS record with the current time every minute or so would do the trick too. You would need to capture and save this record during system startup to determine the downtime.

Greetings, Martin

[Uwe Zessin]

That's a good idea, Martin. You could even write the boottime and the current time into an indexed file where the boottime is the primary key. You do a write the first time and then just issue updates against the same key. That way you even have a history in one file.

Hein, do you see a problem with repeated updates?

[Willem Grooters]

Uwe,

It's even better, for I learned there is an interface to get your applications write data to be included into T4 measurements. This may improve your reporting, where you can can add 'application uptime' to the reporting. What use is an up system if it cannot be used ;-)

Willem

[Hein van den Heuvel]

RMS has no problem with repeated updates.

The only very minor worry might be (not in this case) if you have a bunch of somewhat tightly packed records and they all grow during update. Maybe they are variable length and data fields get added, or maybe they start out blank and compression gets less effective as they get filled. For those cases you want some 'fill factor', or preload the record with garbage. In your case this might mean filling the 'update time' right way on the first put, but we are not talknig about thousands of systems to be monitorred are we? so no issue.

You can make the update very efficient by remembering the RFA after the put (or after a first find/get). However... you might want to consider a full open/find/update and maybe even a process creation for this job, as long as you don't do that every second, but every 5 minutes or so.
Why? Because this will prove the system was not only 'up' but was also able to perform a slightly complex tasks. If the system can do the update, but could not do the open (due to a disk lock perhaps) then would you consider the system to be up or down?

Finally... for these low usage applications consider a less effective, but easier to deal with key. Instead of the 'natural' VMS binary date key and time data fields, I'd use text in the YYYYMMDDHHMMSS format as that is readable and also sorts fine. I might even throw in some dashes or colon's to make is more readable still knowing full well this that this fixed fluff wastes recources :-).

Hein.

[Dante_5]

Where do I get T4 ? Does it run on both Alphas and Vaxes ?

I just got LAR (Local Availability Reporter) from HP, and it seems to be a nice tool so far. I still haven't checked the documentation completely, but unfortunatelly it just runs under Alpha.

Thanks to all!
Dante

[Martin P.J. Zinser]

Hello Dante,

T4 is at

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/products/t4/index.html

it looks like it is Alpha only (although I think it should be possible to do this on a VAX with a current VMS too, maybe ask hp if they have something that is not on the website)


Greetings, Martin