So, two weeks ago, one day before I left for a Thursday-Tuesday vacation on which I had no intention of taking work, I was told that by the following Friday morning, I'd need to be able to answer this question:
Is this Dell PowerEdge 2650 capable of sustaining increased loads of Group1's Code1 Plus, or do we need to replace it with a larger machine, potentially the same configuration now, but with the possibilty to build out to more processors [than 2 2.4 GHz Xeons] and more RAM [than 2 GB]?
This is the kind of question you answer by picking some piece of performance benchmarking software, and letting it collect data and produce reports that are sufficiently shiny for management. But, as near as I can tell, everything on freshmeat wants to be running all the time in an X window and give you an immediate visual representation, not logging data. Yes, yes, MRTG can do this. Not installed, and I really didn't have the time to go make SNMP nodes representing the information I wanted from scratch, thanks. (Nor do I ever have the desire, really. That's not much of a solution… why isn't there a libmeasure or some shit like that that'll just do all the same proc and memory groveling that top(1) does?)
In any case, my solution was “dump top's output to a log every five minutes, figure out how to parse it later”. I'm sure you would have done something wondefully more spectacular. I don't really care.
But if you're interested, what I used is here. You'll need Perl to run the important bit, and a gnuplot linked against libpng to view the pretty graphs. This is a work in progress, of course… and it'll progress just as soon as I actually need it to do something more. Basically, run topdump.sh out of cron however often you like (I use 5 minutes), feed the data to topgrok.pl (if you want to look at more than a day at a time, cat them >> another file), then run gnuplot <file>.<metric>.gnuplot.
It makes pretty pictures like these:
If anyone's got a good, history-keeping, performance monitor that they like, feel free to let me know. I already know about Automos, Sysload, System Garden Habitat, OpenNMS, and atsar. None of them seem to do quite the right thing. Cricket sounds like it's a generalized version of the wheel I just reinvented… but it's a bit too do-it-yourself (like MRTG) for the corporate taste. monet looks promising, but I haven't even downloaded it, much less played with it yet. I'm very much not interested in any vendor-specific, GUI-centric hoo-ha like HP OpenView.
So, any thoughts?
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