[Info-vax] Monitor beginning and ending dates

[Tad Winters]

On 3/9/2021 3:49 PM, Rich Jordan via Info-vax wrote:
> 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

I've not messed with MONITOR in a long time, but I don't recall putting
quotes around datetime.  Have you tried without the quotes?