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

Some New Performance Monitoring Tools

There is a simple and extensible open source C based daemon called collectd that writes to RRD files, an alternative to Orca/procallator for people who don't want the Perl based memory footprint of procallator. I'll check it out on my Gumstix millicomputer sometime.

There is yet another open source full-function monitoring tool called Zabbix that looks similar to Cacti in scope, possibly with more features, and with a SQL database backend. It has a commercial company backing it with support contracts etc, somewhat like the XE Toolkit.

The most interesting commercial tool I saw at CMG earlier this month is a capacity monitoring tool called PAWZ from Perfcap Corporation. The key thing they have worked on is taking the human out of the loop as much as possible with sophisticated capacity modelling algorithms and a simple and scalable operational model. It is very similar in concept to the capacity planning research I was working on and publishing in 2002-2004. The core idea is that you care about "headroom" in a service, and anything that limits that headroom is taken into account. Running out of CPU power, network bandwidth, memory, threads etc. will increase response time of the service, so monitor them all, track trends in headroom and calculate the point in time where lack of headroom will impact service response time. At eBay we used to call this the "time to live" for a service. You can easily focus on the services that have the shortest time to live, and proactively make sure that you have a low probability of poor response time. I'm going to take a closer look at this one...

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....