VSI OpenVMS Forum

Morning all,

We've got a production node that is experiencing some performance problems and I've used the MONITOR PROC/TOPCPU to see what processes are using the CPU etc. I then read in the help that I could record this using the /RECORD switch, however I'm not sure how to interrogate the data once I've finished monitoring.

It's created a file called MONITOR.DAT, about 2Mb, so how do I analyze/report on it? I tried the CONVERT command but that failed with:

XXXXXX (VMSxxx) $ MONITOR
MONITOR> CONVERT MON_CPU.DAT/OUTPUT=G.LOG
%MONITOR-E-ERRPARSE, error parsing command
%CLI-W-IVVERB, unrecognized command verb - check validity and spelling
\CONVERT\
MONITOR> help convert

CONVERT

The CONVERT command converts a pre-Version 5.0 MONITOR recording
file to the current format.

Format

CONVERT file-spec


Yet the CONVERT command is supposedly available....

Any comments/advice/caveats/pointers to documentation would be great!

Happy Friday.

Gary

You replay the recorded data using

$ MONITOR PROC/TOPCPU /INPUT=MONITOR.DAT

You can extend the time each screen is displayed by adding /VIEWING_TIME=seconds

Thanks Martin, that works just fine!

Your immediate question is answered: Use /INPUT=. Good.

For the real problem please consider using T4 or similar - if you have not done so already.
It will more easily show which time windows to 'zoom into' and perhaps which days.
It may give you some correlations to get better insight as to the underlying issues.
For example, in which mode (user, exec, kernel) is the higher CPU load mostly used?
High lock rates at high CPU times?
You can also try to 'group' your processes by name: BATCH, SRV, FTP, TCPIP, XYZ,...

MONI PROC/TUPC is certainly a valuable tool, but you need to know when to look.

hth,
Hein

Thanks Hein for the advice.

I've had a look for T4 and found info about it here

https://vmssoftware.com/products/t4/

However, I'm not 100% sure how/where to get the kit for it, can you point me at it please? I found mention of an HP kit
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/openvms/t4/T4_T44_KIT.ZIP but not sure if that's OK to use?

Regards

Gary

Gary,

if you're running an HP OpenVMS version, this HP T4 V4.4 kit is the kit to use...

Volker.

OK, thanks. We're running on VSI OpenVMS, is the HP kit OK to use or should I raise a support ticket I wonder?

At least with the OpenVMS V8.x versions, HP has supplied a T4 kit with OpenVMS in the SYS$ETC directory. Don't know whether VSI also do that, and can't check right now..

Raised a VSI support call and was given details of how to download T4 from VSI.

A colleague is now setting it up on one of our servers to try out.

Regards

Gary

To visualize the T4 data, there's a new tool available here: http://www.xdelta.co.uk/xdelta_t4viewer.html