Performance Monitoring

[Scott McDade]

Hello:

I am trying to establish a baseline of system performance for my HPUX 11i C3600 workstation. I would like to monitor and log the CPU, Disk I/O and Memory usage with its current load. And then install a new application and monitor the system performance with the new application running and to see what kind of load the app puts on the system. I have used "vmstat" and "top" in the past but they appear to be more real-time and don't appear to have logging capabilities. Do any of you have any recommendations or possible scripts I would use?

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Hi,
If you don't need this performance monitoring permanent you can install the Trial version of Glance from the HP-UX application CD.

[Sridhar Bhaskarla · Accepted solution]

Scott,

There are couple of good softwares you can get. However, glance is widely used for performance management on HP systems. You can get a trial pack from your application CDs just to have a feel of it. If you are satisfied you can then purchase it. It's worth doing it.

If you are not willing to go for additional softwares, one thing I can think of is "sar". Enable sar in your cron. Look at sa1 man page on how to setup cron. You will get a wide variety of reports with sar but on the downside is that it doesn't give good information on memory usage. But you can get memory usage from vmstat.

There is a software called 'sarcheck' at http://www.sarcheck.com/ It doesn't seem to be expensive. You can also try an evaluation copy.

-Sri

[doug mielke]

Sar can give you loads of info.

You can setr up logging as described on the sa1 man page,
Or run form the command line.


sar -A x y > outfile

where x is the interval of sample in seconds,
y is number of iterations.

Output is not easy to read like glance, but much of the same info will be there. And, it's free.

i.e.
sar -A 30 10000 > outfile would five 5000 enties at twice a minute

[Ralph Haefner]

I agree that using sar is a good idea. One tip though - depending on how much disk space you have free for logging you may want to clean up after it. I add a cron job that goes through and gzips any sar output files older than 3 days old whenever I enable sar.

[Amiel Tutolo]

There is some software from Aptitune Corp called SARcheck. This will clean up sar data and make it a little easier to read. It also will make recommendations for tuning. I use this on all my machines but find on our development box it works best since we can throw new apps at it all the time. Prine is reasonable as well.