Capacity planning reports

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

We have a lot of systems running VMS 6.2 up to 7.3. On all of them, performance advisor 2.1 is collecting performance data.

I would like to generate html reports without manual intervention. It should contains graphs and text.

I was thinking of something like :

1) weekly use adv export to select summary data of e.g. cpu usage (compressed by day with /interval)

2) use this summary data to generate graphs usable in html (or whatever that is generally browsable).

Did anyone see/use freeware to do such a thing ?

[Martin P.J. Zinser]

Hello Wim,

you might want to have a look at T4 for such
purposes. See

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

I am not sure about the base T4 kit, but the one that comes with the SHC discussed here recently also has a tool that generates automatically graphs and HTML pages with the results.

Greetings, Martin

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

Martin,

CSV is fine for manualy creating graph in e.g. Excel. But I would like to generate a document (html) that uses graphs automatically generated based upon CSV files. So, my problem is not to get the CSV files but to convert them to graphs automatically.

I tried Javascript graphs but they are simply too slow.

An acceptable solution would be to convert .ps files of performance advisor to .bmp or so.

[Jiri_5]

Try CSVPNG - This program generates line graphs from OpenVMS T4 CSV Files.

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

Jiri,

Where do I find it ?

[Petr Spisek]

Hello Wim,
you can use .CSV from T4 to MRTG and RRDTOOL http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/ as automatic graph generator in htlm. If you prefer PHP, try PHPLOT tool http://www.phplot.com/ .
These tools generate a dynamic graph-pictures to html pages.

[Martin P.J. Zinser]

Hello Wim,

I am not sure if csvpng is available for separate download, it is definitly available as part of the SHC kit (as I mentioned earlier ;-)

Other possible solutions to turn csv data to graphs:

Gnuplot, Xmgr, Perl (specifically with the Chart http://search.cpan.org/~chartgrp/Chart-2.3/
Chart::Plot
http://search.cpan.org/~smorton/Chart-Plot-0.11/
and GD
http://search.cpan.org/~lds/GD-2.12/
)
modules. Note that Chart::Plot and GD are preinstalled if you use the Perl from the latest Freeware CD.

Greetings, Martin

[Keith Parris · Accepted solution]

I made DECps graphs in .PS form available on the Web by installing GhostScript (see http://www.ghostscript.com/) and GSview (see http://www.ghostgum.com.au/) on the Windows PCs. An HTML menu then pointed to each of the .PS files and GSview/GhostScript displayed them.

The tabular and performance reports were easier, as they come out as .TXT files which can be pointed to by the .HTML and displayed directly by the web browser.

An automated DCL procedure generated all possible DECps graphs and reports on a periodic basis and placed them where the .HTML expected them. (One trick here is that DECps will not produce a graph for which the data is zero; to handle these cases, for each graph, I first copied over a file I called ZERO.PS that just contained a warning that the graph data was zero, ran DECps, and purged the "zero" version of the .PS file if DECps had data and thus created one.)

I've attached the set of DCL procedures and ZERO.* files I used to create DECps graphs and reports, as an example. Cut them apart as indicated, and have fun.

[Ian Miller.]

I've used this
http://wasd.vsm.com.au/wasd/hyperspixx201.zip
before. Very quick&simple to setup and manage, (good for me) and produces pretty pictures (good for the management :-)

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

Keith,

In the mean time, I did exactly the same thing as you did.

I installed ghostscript to convert .ps to .jpeg (not very easy with the doc that is included). The result can indeed be used by html.

I will ftp them to the pc where they can be included in word document. Very sadly but everyone wants word documents instead of html. My 97 version of word is however not able to edit the html page correctly (I was hoping to generate an html document and to do edit with word in the browser. But the images are ignored).

Wim

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

I used the scripts of Keith with a modification : after generating postscript, I convert it on VMS to jpeg. This has the advantage that nothing special on the PC is needed.

Just one remark : is performance advisor able to generate a graph with simply %cpu used ? Now I always have the subelements and managers don't understand that. I would also like a graph of total disk space available ...

[Keith Parris]

> is performance advisor able to generate a graph with simply %cpu used ? Now I always have the subelements and managers don't understand that. <

I don't know the command-line name for this graph off-hand, but via the GUI interface the graph under Display Top --> Top Physical Processors --> Busy may be suitable, particularly if you use a stacked graph on an SMP box. Or try a custom graph: Display Custom --> System Metrics and graph the metric named CPU_TOTAL. A stacked custom graph of Display Custom --> Processor Metrics by Physical CPU ID... --> P_BUSY might also do the job.

> I would also like a graph of total disk space available ... <

Try the graph Display Top --> Top Disk Volumes --> Percent Used Space (or Percent Free Space). This generates a graph of the 6 disks with the highest percentage of used (or free) space. If you need all of the disks on one graph, take a look at th pie chart instead -- it has all disks on it.

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

Keith & Co,

Indeed a lot is possible with the custom graphs. I now create only custom graphs because I have more control on the graph.

I changed to file type PNG. The result is a lot more compact and the graphs are of better quality.

1 problem left : when I use Ghostscript to convert ps to png, it generates a graph for a page, t.i. with a lot of white space surrounding it.

Has anyone an idea of how to trim this whitespace (using VMS tools only, in batch).

Wim
(also had to fight with PSDC versions but that's another story)

[Paul Coviello]

HI we have the csv files from T4 and looking thru some of the replies I haven't relly found what I need... can someone give me the PERL command for plot and or where I can find CSVPNG.

thanks
Paul

[Pat Moran]

The Alpha OpenVMS version of CSVPNG is included in the System Healthcheck kit which is available as a free download from the HP Software Depot: (http://software.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=SHCBASE01).
csvpng_alpha.exe is in the shct4.exe self-extracting archive in the .PCSI kit.