Performance Retrieval in HP-UX

[finas]

Hi HP-UX experts,
Would like to seek your advise. If i were to retrieve HP-UX performance statistic for 2 weeks... what is the comprehensive way to gather this information? if can, i don't want to run glance and top everyday. Is it possible for me to run the cron job? or how... your advise are highly appreciated. Thank you.

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

There are 2 tools available to you to do this. 1 is free, the other you have to pay for.

The free one is 'sar'. Peruse the 'sar' man page on how to set this up to run and gather your statistics automatically.

The one you have to pay for is MeasureWare, or I believe the new name is OpenView Performance Agent. If you have this installed and running, then it is gathering data for you already. You can extract this data via the 'extract' command (see the man page for more information) or via PerfView if you purchased it. The extract command allows you to extract the data and then make graphs with other tools (like Excel).

[finas]

Hi Mr Patrick,
Thanks for the reply.
Can we get the information with sar as comprehensive as measureware. I last time tried sar -v 2 5. Just wondering do I have to run few commands using sar to get the output. Which one do you prefer as the hp-ux expert personal view?

[Patrick Wallek]

I much prefer the data out of MeasureWare. If you have PerfView you can view quite a bit of data pretty easily.

If you don't have PerfView, the extract command can give you a lot of data to review and you can build your own graphs from there.

[finas]

Hi Mr Patrick,
Thank you so much for your advise. :) Hope to see you in my next question..

[finas]

Hi HP-UX experts,
I've a following question about the performance monitoring tools. If we were to run the measureware or perfview, will it affect the memory utilisation. since we have some restriction in term of memory limitation. will it take up the memory usage? hope to hear your clarification. thank you in advance.

[Ted Buis]

You could automate the capture of glance information, but then you would have to manually pull it together. There used to be a trial copy of MeasureWare available. I believe that it has been renamed by marketing as an OpenView product, so it may not be so easy to find.

[Patrick Wallek]

Yes, it is possible that Measureware would effect memory usage. In fact it almost certainly will as it is a process that is running all the time. It's memory footprint is relatively small though. I have run Measureware for years on systems with less than 1GB of RAM with no real issues.

There is a phenomenon called the "observer effect," which states (very basically) that the act of observing something will effect that which is being observed. Have a read through this web page, specifically the "Use in Information Technology" section.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

This toolset has a vastly lower impact than measurewere. I got it from HP and fixed some bugs.

http://www.hpux.ws/system.perf.sh

SEP

[Geoff Wild]

Here's how I do it woith measureware:

Root cron:

# performance
55 23 * * 1-5 /opt/perf/bin/extract -xp -r /home/gwild/zgbltemplate -g -b today 7:00 -e today 18:00 -f stdout | /bin/mailx -s 'IPR performance report' sysadm >/dev/null 2>&1



# cat /home/gwild/zgbltemplate
REPORT "MWA Export on !SYSTEM_ID"
FORMAT ASCII
HEADINGS ON
SEPARATOR="|"
SUMMARY=60
MISSING=0
DATA TYPE GLOBAL
YEAR
DATE
TIME
GBL_CPU_TOTAL_UTIL
GBL_CPU_SYS_MODE_UTIL
GBL_CPU_USER_MODE_UTIL
GBL_CPU_SYSCALL_UTIL
GBL_CPU_INTERRUPT_UTIL
GBL_PRI_QUEUE
GBL_CPU_CSWITCH_UTIL
GBL_SWAP_SPACE_UTIL
GBL_DISK_UTIL_PEAK
GBL_DISK_SUBSYSTEM_QUEUE
GBL_MEM_UTIL
GBL_MEM_CACHE_HIT_PCT
GBL_MEM_PAGEOUT_RATE
GBL_MEM_SWAPOUT_RATE
GBL_MEM_QUEUE
GBL_NET_PACKET_RATE
GBL_NET_OUTQUEUE
GBL_NETWORK_SUBSYSTEM_QUEUE


Rgds...Geoff