Performance Monitoring Tools

[Tilok]

Hi guys, one favour, i would like to know which tool is best for performance monitoring for HP environment, best in sense i can get maximum information with flexible formats.
currently i have installed HP Glanceplus pak, i have heard about BMC PATROL, but never have exposour or hands on it.
Can you suggest base on your experience.
Thanks in advance.

[Sebastian Galeski_1]

Hi in my opinion the best one is glance (gpm in X-window) why: you can see over 1500 different metric of system, but unfortunately sometimes glance lie and if i see something strange in glance i always check this same with sar or other command like iostat, vmstat.
If i want to say somethig more about system in longer period of time i use mwa and extract command or perfview for visualize.

regards Seba

[Printaporn_1]

Hi,
I use gpm and glance for monitoring/config alert and use /opt/perf/bin/extract program to extrace performance data to PC and upload to excel to do report , all everything in detail can get from those tools.

[Stefan Farrelly · Accepted solution]

Glance is simply the best for interactive monitoring, but for historical monitoring (eg. what happened last night or week at X time - someone complained it was slow) you need PerfView and the Measureware agent (which collects the data). PerfView has a nice graphical interface like glance (gpm) which allows you to go back in time to see what was going on, to a very detailed level.

Ive seen BMC Patrol before, nowhere near as good as Glance/PerfView.

[Vincent Stedema]

Hi,

GlancePlus is good enough, if you're only interested in monitoring the performance. gpm allows you to connect other to servers in a network, so you can centrally monitor multiple servers. You can configure thresholds for performance data (cpu/memory utilization etc.) and if I'm correct, glance can send alerts via SNMP or an OpenView agent.

BMC and the like (OpenView IT/O, Tivoli, Unicenter) are:

1. Very expensive.
2. Probably too fully featured for your needs.

Hope this helps.

Vincent

[Bill Hassell]

As mentioned, Glance gives real time information while the companion program gpm (which requires an Xwindow display) gives a short history of activity.

A separate product called MeasureWare is used to capture long term data (weeks) and is limited only by the disk space you want to dedicate to the history files. With MeasureWare (mwa), you can extract virtually any type of data over specific dates/times by using the extract command. Typically, this data is exported in ASCII or spreadsheet format which is suitable for import to popular data analysis and graphing programs such as Excel. Or you can get the optional product PerfView which runs on both the 9000 (requires Xwindows) or on a PC to create the graphs.

Glance (and it's emasurement daemon) are highly coupled to the operating system so it's important to keep up on the latest release for midaemon and Glance as patches are made to the kernel.

[Bob Perschau]

I'll weigh in with the Measureware/Glance combo too. I have a cronjob that extracts the Measureware data regularly and sends it off to rrdtool <> for graphing and posting to intranet. The managers here love the steady stream of graphs.

Just my $.02
Bob Perschau
Sr Unix Geek
Panduit Corp