SUMMARY: Quick And Dirty Performance Monitor

From: Rodney Wines (Rodney.Wines@ahqps.alcatel.fr)
Date: Wed Jun 30 1999 - 09:51:15 CDT


Thanks to everyone for the VERY quick response. Original question:

> We're evaluating an application that's intended to run on a Solaris 2.6
box,
> and my boss said, "Give me some idea of system load ...". Of course, he
> couldn't be more specific, but I've got to provide something. So, does
> anyone know of a freeware performance monitoring tool?

Tools bundled with Solaris:

sar, iostat, vmstat, mpstat, uptime (for job load), xload and perfmeter
(don't seem to get installed by default on servers without graphics heads),
symon (supposedly bundled with Solaris, but I couldn't find it on my system),

Most of these are primitive, and would require stuffing the output into
gnuplot, or equivalent, in order to get pretty graphics. Perfmeter has a
nice X display with a lot of options, and will write to a log file.

Downloadable tools:

SymbEL: http://www.sun.com/sun-on-net/performance/se3/

According to Stephen Wolthusen, "The SymbEL package, by Adrian Cockroft, is a
scripting language for performance with some graphic bells & whistles. The
example scripts provided range from mundane io/cpu statistics via
comprehensive system information to elaborate automatic monitoring and
tuning, some scripts also come with graphics. Great tool, even if you're just
curious what the system is up to. Also strongly recommended is
Adrian's book (don't let the subtitle fool you):"

    Sun Performance and Tuning : Java and the Internet
    Adrian Cockcroft, Richard Pettit, Sun Microsystems
    Prentice Hall
    ISBN: 0130952494
    USD 51.00
    http://www.sun.com/980922/tuning2/ has more information

PROCTOOL: www.sunfreeware.com and http://smc.vnet.net/

According to Tim Ambrose, It has a "save to file" option and the graphs are
great. Gives tons of detail about processes, and he uses it a lot to guage
I/O Wait states on disks.

According to Joe Morel, It is pkgadd and has neat graphs that could perhaps
be copied to .jpg or .gif files and included in a "word" document.

xperfmon: ftp.x.org

pstat: www.sunfreeware.com

perfbar: Provided by Peter Wargo. He didn't say where he got it. According
to Peter, "... nice little bar graph tool.

    Red= system
    Blue= Idle
    Green = User
    Yellow = I/O wait.

It looks stunning on the 40-CPU domain on our E10K..."

spong: http://strobe.weeg.uiowa.edu/~edhill/public/spong/

According to Tabor J. Wells, spong which is client/server based and has an
API for building customized modules.

Again, thanks for the excellent information.

Rodney



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