[Info-vax] Monitor beginning and ending dates

[Rich Jordan]

Its embarrassing to ask but I'm out of time to play with this.  I have a monitor data file from an alphaserver that collected from mid-day March 5th until mid-day March 8th.  I want to generate summaries for a 1 hour period each night when backup is running, and I'll need to do a few more of these monitors and analyses in the future.  

HPE VMS Alpha V8.4, patched up to about 2 years ago, tried viewing both on the Alpha and on an Integrity box running VMS V8.3-1h1 (patched up to date) with, as expected, identical results.

Viewing them is not an issue.  /beginning=5-mar-2021:23:00:00 gets me right there.  But any attempt to generate a summary with no interactive output errors out if an ending time is supplied:  

%MONITOR-E-BEGNLEND, beginning time not earlier than ending time

Doesn't matter what I put in the end time, if it is an absolute time or a combination or just a delta time  it never gets past the initial parsing error.

So is it possible to do something equivalent to this and have it work?

$ MONITOR/INPUT=MYMON.DAT -
   /NODISPLAY/SUMMARY=MONSUM.SUM -
   ALL_CLASSES,DISK/ITEM=ALL -
  /BEGIN="5-MAR-2021:23:00:00" /END="6-MAR-2021:00:00:00"
 
Tried this with various combinations of absolute and delta times  (like 05-MAR-2021:00:00+0-23:00:00) for begin or end time, mixing absolute and delta times.  Any attempt to add an end time causes the error.

So what is the secret sauce?  Right now I'm thinking of having submon run at 10:50PM each night, then have it submit a second job to kill the monitor process at midnight plus 5 minutes and just create a new monitor data file each night with a forced end time so I can get a summary of the whole data file.  

Thanks