[Info-vax] VSI has purchased PERFDAT from HPE

[Marc Van Dyck]

IanD explained on 16/05/2019 :
> I have and I found the software really good with the ability to incorporate 
> various sources of data as well, like storage etc
>
> Compared to T4, it's light years ahead
>
> I also used PSPA many years ago, which I must say I enjoyed. I particularly 
> liked the advisory aspect of it because it had the ability to bundle certain 
> events together and classify them rather than measure strictly by typical VMS 
> performance metrics. Hot files I remember being a helpful measure (yes, you 
> can get this from cache data). This was like nearly 12+ years ago I think 
> now, so I'm struggling to remember much about it.  I used PSPA running over X 
> Windows and some of the analysis collection could take 8+ hours which caused 
> all sorts of problems because we were behind a jumphost which was set to pass 
> through X Windows but the port was only allowed to be open for 8 hours so it 
> would get closed if it didn't detect traffic, which it often didn't
>
I have also used the rules-based engine of PSPA to tune my systems.
That was in VAX times. Unfortunately, even DEC did not follow very
closely the apparition of new, more performant hardware, that would 
have
required new releases of this engine (or at least the data that it was
using) so it quickly became unusable.

Today, we are still using it for four main purposes :

- display the behaviour of the systems in real time ; each system
exports a display panel of its main performance data, so that we can
quickly point out systems that do not perform normally (it's also a
bit for the show, to impress managers and visitors) ; we have a wall of
8 screens to display that ;

- publish daily, weekly, and monthly graphs of CPU usage, memory usage,
compute queue length, etc... on a web site. Also a few reports ;

- Extract long-term performance data and export them to excel for
capacity planning purposes (linear regression, when do we hit the 
limit,
and things like that) ;

- Drill down in the data accumulated by PSDC in case of performance
issues.

I could certainly do the 3 last ones with T4 (and now perfdat) but I
will miss the real time displays a lot if I loose them.

We have also developped some stuff to get network and fibre channel
traffic data that PSDC does not know about.

-- 
Marc Van Dyck