Windows Performance Counter Port to Linux, HP-UX and AIX

Question

We implemented a server application available on Windows only. Now we like to port it to Linux, HP-UX and AIX, too. This application provides internal statistics through performance counters into the Windows Performance Monitor.

To be more precise: The application is a data base, and we like to provide information like number of connected users or number of requests executed to the administrator. So these are "new" information, proprietary to our application. But we like to make them available in the same environment where the operating system delivers information like the CPU, etc. The goal is to make them easily readable for the administrator.

What is the appropriate and commonly used performance monitor under Linux, HP-UX and AIX?

Answer 1

I would say: that depends on which performance you want to monitor. Used CPU time? Free RAM? Disk IO? Number of beers in your freezer...

But regardless of this you can look at any files below /proc. I'm not sure for HP, but at least Linux and AIX should have that tree (if it's not deactivated at kernel compile time).

Answer 2

Management is where most OSes depart from one another. For this reason there are not many tools that are common between all the OSes.

Additionally, Unix tools follow the single process single responsibility idiom where one tool gets cpu info, another gets memory etc.

The only tool i have seen in the Unix world that gets all this info in one place is top. Almost all sys admins are familiar with this tool and works on all the flavors of OSes you are interested in. It also has the additional advantage of being open source. You could simply extend this tool to expose the counters you are interested in and ship it along with your application.

Another way to do this might be to expose your counters through SNMP and leave it to some third party SNMP tool like HP open view that can collect and present a consistent view along with other management info. This might be a more enterprisy solution, which might appeal to the marketing folks.

I would also say its a good idea to write a standalone console tool that admins can use from their custom home grown scripts (there are many firsm out there with super human admins / over paid it staff that does this).

All together would be a healthy solution for your requirement i think.

Answer 3

The most standard unix tools for such data are the *stat (iostat, vmstat, netstat) tools and sar. On Linux you'll find all this information in /proc, but most Unixes don't have /proc nicely filled with what you are looking for. The mentioned tools are quite standardized and can be used to gather the data you need.