Intersystems Cache routine to write process information to a file on local system?

Question

I am interested in creating a routine that would query the currently running cache processes and then write this information to a file. How could this be done in Cache 2008.2?

Answer 1

PERFMON might be what you're looking for. That's app with it's own UI, but you can call it's functions directly too, as an API.

Check the Cache docs for "Cache Monitoring Guide". That will give you links to PERFMON docs, as well as docs for other system monitoring tools.

You might find something useful in the Class Reference, under packages %SYSTEM, %SYS, and %Monitor.

For some process info you might need to shell out to the OS. In that case check into the $ZF function. That will let you invoke os-level commands from within Cache.

Oh, and you might want to consider saving the process data within the Cache DB, rather than dumping it out to a file. That is, create a Persistent Class with Properties corresponding to each process attribute that you want to capture, then write code to create, populate, and save instances of that class, taking the data from PERFMON or whatever other source you choose.

If you do that you can use Cache SQL to generate whatever kind of report you need. (Cache will automatically generate a SQL Table corresponding to your Persistent Class.) Cache supports ODBC, so you can use an external tool like Crystal Reports or Access for that part.

Obviously that will be more work than just echoing data to a file, but some kind of structure will be needed if you're going to do anything interesting with the information.