XE Toolkit 1.2 - new portable performance tools from Rich Pettit

Rich just updated the portable Java based XE tookit, it even runs on mainframes now :-)

Rich (with some contributions from me) wrote many versions of the SE toolkit for Solaris. This is his latest project, please try it out, give him feedback and buy a support contract to encourage him...

Cheers Adrian

Subject: [Xetoolkit-interest] XE Version 1.2 Available
To: xetoolkit-interest@xetoolkit.com


XE Version 1.2 is available in pre-packaged form through the Captive
Metrics online store, http://store.captivemetrics.com.

New platforms for 1.2:
AIX (5.3 base)
Linux on Power (IBM pSeries & iSeries)
Linux on s390 (IBM zSeries)

Please report bugs to support@captivemetrics.com.

Changes since Version 1.1

Bug fixes
Solaris locking problems
Performance improvements in mdr
Locale problems in non-US-English Windows installs
Support for AIX (5.3 base)
Support for Linux on Power (IBM pSeries & iSeries)
Support for Linux on s390 (IBM zSeries)
Code restructuring and use of new "snap" utility
and command-line build for Windows
VirtualGuru rotates log files when the day changes
bbClient groovy script for monitoring BigBrother clients

The source code is available at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/xe-toolkit as an SVN tree.
There will be a web site with "tarballs" eventually. It's not
high on the priority list.

The build process uses "snap", a /bin/sh utility written by me that
generates Makefiles on the fly.

Please support future development by purchasing the package.

Thank you for your continued interest.

Rich
--
Richard Pettit
Captive Metrics Software Corporation
Em: richp@captivemetrics.com
Ph: 8-MONITOR-01

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....