Monday, April 16, 2007

SEtoolkit and XEtoolkit releases

The SEtoolkit was developed in 1993 by Rich Pettit, and I used it as a way to prototype many new tools and ideas over the years. Its a Solaris specific performance tool scripting language that supports very rapid development of new tools. The SEtoolkit has been widely deployed as the Solaris collector for the popular system performance monitor Orca. Rich gave up development of the SEtoolkit a few years ago, put the code into open source under GPL, and its now available via sourceforge, where it is being maintained by Dagobert Michelsen. A bug in the SEtoolkit was causing it to crash when used with complex disk subsystems, and this has now been fixed in the SE3.4.1 release (April 10th, 2007).

Meanwhile, Rich has been trying to make a multi-platform (Solaris, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OSX, HP-UX, AIX) version of SE for a long time, and finally gave up trying to implement his own language, and based his latest development, the XEtoolkit, on Java 5. The first full release XEtoolkit 1.0 came out on April 15th, 2007. The code is released and supported under both open source and commercial licenses, by Rich's new company - Captive Metrics. The GPL license allows full free use of the provided tools, and development of new and derived tools that are also contributed to the community. The commercial license allows custom XEtoolkit development for proprietary tools, with a higher level of support.

The XEtoolkit 1.0 release doesn't support HP-UX or AIX, but AIX support is coming soon. I encourage you to try it out, give Rich some feedback and make it worth his while to continue. He's one of the very best programmers and performance tool architects I've ever met....

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