Saturday, July 23, 2005

Extracct code posted on orcaware.com

Since the code I was writing to extract useful information from extended accounting logs is intended to end up as a data source for Orca, it made sense to host it on that site. I haven't had a chance to do any more development on it for a few months, so the source, including SPARC and x86 binaries is now posted there. Thanks to Blair Zajac for the space.

extracct - extract useful data from extended Solaris accounting

If anyone feels inspired to develop it further, please send me any changes you make.

Cheers Adrian

Update Feb 2006: I just downloaded it and untar'd it with no problem, so try downloading it again if you have any problems, should be about 54K long.

Adrian

Friday, July 15, 2005

Free performance and capacity tools

What free tools do you use for performance and capacity planning work? I'm particularly interested in figuring out combinations of tools that work well together.

Mario Jauvin and I are signed up to present a workshop this december at CMG05 in Florida on performance monitoring and capacity planning with free tools. I know a lot about some of the tools, but it would be useful to get some input on the relative usage level of what is available.

Here is a list of the kind of tools I'm interested in:

Orca, www.orcaware.com data collection using SE toolkit etc. and web display using rrdtool
BigBrother www.bb4.org and BigSister, bigsister.graeff.com which do you use and why?
OpenNMS, opennms.org/wiki Large scale network management system
Nagios, www.nagios.org/about Simpler and smaller scale network element management
SE Toolkit, www.sunfreeware.com/setoolkit.html Solaris specific instrumentation and tools
R, www.r-project.org statistical analysis and graphing package
MySQL, www.mysql.com database for storing large amounts of performance data
PDQ, www.perfdynamics.com toolkit for building analytical queueing models in C or Perl
Ganglia, ganglia.sourceforge.net large scale distributed system monitoring

Does the license model matter? There is a wide variety of licenses for free tools, from an absence of any license, through GPL to free use of commercially owned products. Do you use anything that is free, or does it have to meet some criteria?

I'm inviting a lot more input than I have before, add comments to this post or send me messages, I'll summarize, and I'll describe the tools in more detail and how they inter-relate in future postings.

Cheers Adrian