Compaq Storage Performance Monitor HOWTO

Chris Lorenz

lorenzc@us.ibm.com

2002-07-11
Revision History                                                             
Revision 1.0            2002-07-11             Revised by: CL                


This HOWTO provides an overview of the Compaq Storage Performance Monitor,
including a description of the product and installation and configuration
information.

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Table of Contents
1. Copyright and Legal Notice
2. What Is the Compaq Storage Performance Monitor?
3. Requirements
    3.1. Requirements for CSPM V1.0
    3.2. Requirements for CSPM V2.0 and Later
   
   
4. Installing CSPM and its Requirements
    4.1. Installing Qt 3.0 or Later
    4.2. Installing CSPM
   
   
5. Modifying CSPM Defaults
6. Interpreting CSPM Output

1. Copyright and Legal Notice

Copyright  2002 IBM Corporation. All rights reserved.

This document is provided "AS IS," with no express or implied warranties. Use
the information in this document at your own risk.

Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Other company, product,
and service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute, and/or modify this document under
the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later
version published by the Free Software Foundation with no Invariant Sections,
no Front-Cover text, and no Back-Cover text. A copy of the license can be
found at [http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.txt] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/
fdl.txt.
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2. What Is the Compaq Storage Performance Monitor?

The Compaq Storage Performance Monitor (CSPM), written by Don Dupuis of
Compaq Computer Corporation, is a graphical tool that monitors read and write
statistics on Linux systems. CSPM monitors the system on a per disk, per
controller, and systemwide basis. CSPM gathers all the data automatically and
then generates a histogram display of system throughput and of every disk and
controller. By default, CSPM monitors sectors and blocks. It can also monitor
IOs, merges, and reads and writes.
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3. Requirements

This section describes the requirements for different versions of CSPM.
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3.1. Requirements for CSPM V1.0

CSPM V1.0 requires the following:

*Red Hat Linux 7.2 or later, or Mandrake 8.2 or later.
   
*The Trolltech Qt 3.0 C++ application development environment, which is
    available for download from Trolltech for free.
   
*If you wish to gather statistics on more than the default 16 disks, you
    will need to download the following patch, created by Mingming Cao of
    IBM: [http://lse.sourceforge.net/resource/diskio.html] http://
    lse.sourceforge.net/resource/diskio/diskio.html.
   

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3.2. Requirements for CSPM V2.0 and Later

CSPM V2.0 and later require the following:

*Red Hat Linux 7.2 or later, or Mandrake 8.2 or later.
   
*The Trolltech Qt 3.0 C++ application development environment, which is
    available for download from Trolltech for free.
   

CSPM V2.0 and later gather statistics on all major devices in the system
(these versions of CSPM use Stephen Tweedie's sar kernel patch, which allows
more than 15 disks to be monitored).
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4. Installing CSPM and its Requirements

This section describes how to acquire the Qt application development
environment and install CSPM.
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4.1. Installing Qt 3.0 or Later

Qt 3.0 or later must be installed on the system before you install CSPM.
Follow these steps to acquire and configure Qt:

*Download the Qt X/11 Free Edition from [www.trolltech.com] http://
    www.trolltech.com for the latest version of Qt.
   
*Follow Trolltech's instructions for installing Qt.
   
*When running ./configure, add the -thread switch to the configure program
    so that Qt is installed to run in multithreaded mode.
   
*Be sure to export the variables QTDIR and LD_LIBRARY_PATH, as described
    in the Qt installation instructions that are downloaded with the
    software.
   

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4.2. Installing CSPM

The following steps describe how to download and install CSPM and must be run
by the root user. The installation process creates a directory called cspm
and places all the files in that directory.

 1. Download CSPM from SourceForge at [http://sourceforge.net/projects.cspm]
    http://sourceforge.net/projects.cspm.
   
 2. Untar the spm.tar.gz file:
   
    # tar xvzf spm.tar.gz                                                    
   
 3. Compile CSPM:
   
    # make all                                                               
   
    The make command creates the binary call spm in the current directory.
   
 4. Start the CSPM monitor:
   
    # ./spm                                                                  
   

If a segmentation fault occurs when spm is starting up, make sure that you
have set the QTDIR and LD_LIBRARY_PATH variables, as described in the Qt
installation instructions that are downloaded with the software.
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5. Modifying CSPM Defaults

You can modify the default grid and monitoring settings by selecting Options-
>Preferences. When you select the Options pulldown, you can view the Grid tab
or the Monitor tab.

From the Grid tab you can change:

*the color of the grid lines
   
*the distance (or time), in seconds, between intervals when data is
    collected (horizontal lines appear at each interval)
   
*the color of the read and write lines
   
*the number of horizontal range bars (default is 5)
   
*the size of the histogram titles
   

 [snapshot7]

From the Monitor tab you can change:

*the height and width of the display boxes (in pixels)
   
*the colors of the display boxes
   
*the type of data to be monitored (IOs, data, reads and writes, sectors
    and blocks)
   

 [snapshot8]
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6. Interpreting CSPM Output

When you start up CSPM, a collection of histograms appears. Each histogram
shows data for either a controller, disk, partition, or system throughput.
The key at the bottom of the histogram tables tells which color of histogram
box corresponds to which type of device. The following sample CSPM session
shows controller (purple), disk (green), partition (orange), and system data.

 [snapshot5]

Use the horizontal and vertical scroll bars to view controller, disk, and
partition histograms that do not fit on the initial screen.

By default, the number of "range bars" along the y-coordinate of each
histogram is five. When there is no activity for a particular device, CSPM
provides default values of 0, 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, and 0.8. Once activity begins on
the device, CSPM sets the five values in equal increments from 0 to the peak
data value collected in each collection interval. Sometimes the grid lines
fall directly on the range bar numbers, making the numbers hard to read. You
can either adjust the color of the grid lines, adjust the collection
interval, or try to ignore the grid lines.

To see information about a partition (such as filesystem name, space used,
and space available), right-click on the partition's histogram and then
left-click on Properties. A Partition Status window opens that displays
information about the selected partition.

 [snapshot9]

(This feature will be implemented for controllers and disks in a later
release of CSPM.)
