Performance Monitoring

[Eric Buckner]

Hi everyone!

I am looking for a package for monitoring and planning of our HP systems. The tool I would like to have would have current info as well as historical info. It should have the ability to produce graphs (necessary for Management) and give me the ability to produce planning specifications based on current and future requirements of the system.

I have looked at PerfView and GlancePlus. Each tool is good for 1 piece of the puzzle. However, it doesn't get me anywhere near the planning piece.

That leads me to BMC Patrol. Has anyone had experience with this tool (set of tools)? Are there any other comprehensive tools I should be looking at?

Thanks in advance!
Eric

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi Eric,

The best and proven tool on HP is HP's Glance+ family. You can collect the data, monitor the system and even get alarmed on conditions.

I did see Patrol and worked with BEST/1. BEST/1 is a good tool for Capacity planning but doesn't have detailed information about memory and disk utilization. Patrol Agents seem to take more resources than Measureware agents. I still vote for Glance+/Measureware.

What piece are you looking for that is not provided by Glance+?.

-Sri

[harry d brown jr]

Eric,

The few things that no software package can give you is knowledge about how the business is performing and where it is going.

As a capacity planner, you must be aware of the business trends, growth, new software requirements, and changes in business rules.

Some questions that must have answers:

Will we be processing more data and at what percentage?

How long must the data be retained online?

How fast is our customer base growing?

How fast is our internal users growing? (more users = more resource use)

We use glance/measureware and perfview, to measure and report on current usage, which allows use to see trends, but again, it doesn't let us see new business requirements, which we supplement by being involved in all projects. It really is a guessing game, but when you can control the rules, you can control the game.

live free or die
harry

[Eric Buckner]

Yes sorry I am really more interested in the trending aspect. I realize that business requirements change on a daily basis. What I really want is something that I can look at over a period of time and say "hey looky here we are hitting the system harder the past few months, maybe we need to consider growing the system."

Of course of the other side of the coin, we usually decide we need something to do this after we have been steamrolled, hence my question.

Our application server (yes only 1) has grown by leaps and bounds in the past few months and we are realizing 80-90% CPU utilization most of the time with peaks during the day at 100%. While that isn't so much of an issue in and of itself, it is when it is a 24-way server.

My situation is that I am being asked to prove that we have had a slowly growing problem for the past 5 months when I have only been collection meaningful data for the past month.

I guess I need to get trained up on PV and GP and all that it can do. Is there any crash course material, ie books on PV and GP. Preferrable teach yourself how to be an HP Performance Monitoring God in 5 Minutes :).......

Thanks,
Eric

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Eric,

Install GlancePlus Pak (this comes with Measureware, glance and IT/O SE agent not Perfview). Glance can be used to monitor the systems online. Measureware will continuously collect the data. The available metrics are mentioned in /var/opt/perf/reptall file. I extract the metrics using "extract" utility and pass the information to "rrd" (was using mrtg before). Wrote some cgis to present the data in graphical format on the WEB. It was fun and worked for me.

You can also extract the data from measure into Excel or Spreadsheet and draw graphs. Good documentation is under /opt/perf/doc.

You can get a trial copy from App CD1.

-Sri

[Eric Buckner]

You actually got rrd to compile? I have been trying to get that beast to compile for the past week and am having problems w/ the perl-shared library section in compile.

I do have the GlancePlus Pak, am only running trial of PV. Before I got the PV trial I had done several extracts and was getting the hang of that and really like your idea of sending it to rrd but am hung up w/ the compile. I don't want to derail this thread but would love to discuss the compiling further if you would email me.

Thanks,
Eric

ebuckner@dollargeneral.com

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Eric,

This thread may help you on how I am piping the extract values into rrd/mrtg. Look at it.

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x9f13630fe5c4d5118ff10090279cd0f9,00.html

I will keep in touch with you through mail.

-Sri