On Sunday 11 April 2004 12:43 pm, Tom Shilson wrote: > I would expect to use a tool like RMFPMS only to take a baseline and then > in problem situations. I may install it everywhere but not run it at all on > most Linuxes. If RMFPMS says that process A is using 50% of the CPU and > process B is using 10%, I would assume that A is a lot busier that B, even > though the exact numbers may be wrong. Is this a valid assumption?
Well, it would give you a general idea. The advantage of running an agent inside the Linux guest is that it gives you visibility into the way the Linux scheduler is allocating resources, in it's own terms of processes and threads. RMFPM doesn't do a very good job of discriminating the internal Linux structures -- no better or worse than 'top' - because it's operating from the same bogus input. It (the agent) may give you a general sense of what's happening, but probably not with enough precision to be really helpful over all. > What do you think of using SNMP to collect day-to-day data? It works, as far as it goes. The SMI MIB-II defaults are more oriented to network devices than systems, but if you have MIBs and instrumentation to populate them, it's as valid a method as any other. SNMP is also a lot lighter-weight than RMF-PM (no XML transcoding required), so the numbers are less skewed. On the other hand, the data source is still suspect in that it's pulling it's data from Linux's point of view. You'll need to correlate both Linux and VM results for the same time period to get a true picture. -- db ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
