Free VMS Performance Tools

[Warren G Landrum]

All,

I'm having a serious brain-fart and cannot think of any of the free tools that are available for us to use to do VMS Perf Mgmt. All I can think of righ now is the CA suite of tools that includes DEC Performance Advisor and Data Collector.

Help!

Warren (the Senile One!)

[Andy Bustamante · Accepted solution]

Hi Warren,

T4 and TLViz are good starting point. http://h71000.www7.hp.com/OpenVMS/products/t4/index.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN I can't say enough good things about T4.

TDC http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/products/tdc/?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN is also useful and has some different bells and whistles.

Monitor in batch can provide some good immediate information. T4 uses monitor as one source of collection.

Andy

[Andy Bustamante]

If I can borrow the Senile label, I'll add another tool. Availability Manager, http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/products/availman/index.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN can provide real time information about a system. Very useful for diagnostics and has the ability to apply "fixes" to the system, force quorum to be recalculated, adjust quotas and even force a crash.

Welcome to the VMS forums.

[Hein van den Heuvel]

Warren,

Any particular problem you are trying to resolve / monitor?
A specific problem description might trigger thoughts of other tools to consider.

T4, as mentioned, is pretty good, also for long term trend monitoring.

You may also look as 'pawz' from ex-deccies such as Prem Singha. I believe some components are free.
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/partners/perfcap/index.html#eCAP
http://www.perfcap.com/Products.htm

Hope this helps some,
Hein van den Heuvel (at gmail dot com)
HvdH Performance Consulting

[Robert Gezelter]

Warren,

I can only add an Amen to the chorus concerning the use of T4. While even the basic MONITOR functionality is extremely useful, the ability to do time duration analysis in invaluable.

I also recommend the article on T4 by Steven Lieman. The article can be found at: http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/journal/v3/t4.html

- Bob Gezelter, http://www.rlgsc.com

[Volker Halle]

Warren,

TDC is only a data collector, you need ECP to have a graphical view of the data:

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

Note: ECP is not avaliable to run on OpenVMS I64. But you can look at the data collected on I64 with ECP running on Alpha.

Volker.

[Colin Butcher]

Hi,

T4 yet again. Just sitting there looking at monitor and a few other things live can help too - it never hurts to get a feel for a system's behaviour first hand.

Another good source of T4 information is the openvms.org VMS audio updates - Steve Lieman has provided several T4 tips that way too.

The key thing for me is to understand what the system's typical purpose and workload are - then you can begin to decide whether what you observe makes sense in the context of what it's supposed to be doing.

Usually it's the code that needs fixing! That's where the big wins tend to be.

Cheers, Colin (www.xdelta.co.uk).

[Ian Miller.]

Another one not mentioned so far is HP PERFDAT
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/journal/v8/perfdat.html

I think its not free but for performance and capacity planning its worth a look.

I think the free ones have been covered already.

[Paul Beaudoin]

Waren,

Don't forget to look at the Freeware disks either. There have bees a number of excellent contibutions over the years.

Regards

Paul

[Warren G Landrum]

Thanks guys. That refreshed my memory. Just need to look at some CPU usage stats over a period of time to start getting justification for new gear.

Warren