User guide

Concepts

LivePerf is a performance and resource monitoring tool, designed to present heterogenous data collected from various sources in a graphical way. In LivePerf data is collected by Agents and passed through Host Manager to the Console to be displayed visually, or to be recorded for later playback.

There are two main modes of monitoring using LivePerf and choosing one over the other depends whether Host Manager can be installed on the target machine.

Agent based monitoring

Figure 1. Agent based monitoring

If at all possible, the recommended mode is by using Host Manager to deploy agents remotely. This will offer the greatest flexibility possible in LivePerf. Host Manager will communicate with the Console and manage details such as automatically adjusting for time differences between machines. Note that an agent cannot be deployed in remote mode on a machine where Host Manager is not running.

Agentless monitoring

Figure 2. Agentless monitoring

Where installing Host Manager is not an option, monitoring can still be performed from a distance. Depending on the platform and the type of application being sampled, some application-specific client tools may be required; an example would be DB2 and Websphere. Others will only require configuring permissions to allow remote access, as is the case when retrieving Windows information through the Remote Registry service. Process-based providers may also be created to execute command line tools through the rexec utility.

Agents

Agents have the responsibility of collecting data from various sources and making it available to the Console. Depending on the type of application or system being monitored, an agent can perform its data-collecting duties in two modes:

  • local: the agent itself is run locally and collects data through the network from the monitored system.
  • remote: Host Manager must have been installed on the monitored system. The agent will run on the remote host and will use Host Monitor to send data to the Console.

Host Manager

A Host Manager provides an environment for agents to run in, and acts as a gateway to the Console.

As explained in the section above, a Host Manager generally needs to be installed on every machine to be monitored. The exception is when an agent can be run in 'local' mode, collecting data without a Host Manager.

Event without any agent enabled a Host Manager will provide a few information elements about the host it runs on. This information (operating system version, architecture and time difference between the host and Console) can be seen by selecting the host node in the session tree.

When run, Host Manager will detect all available network interfaces and will prompt you to select the one to use. To select the same interface every time modify the startup script (hm.sh) and add the network index as the second command line parameter.

Console

All control and display functions of LivePerf are available from the Console. Data from all hosts and all agents is presented in a hierarchical layout and can be displayed on screen, or can be recorded in a log file.

Individual performance counters from each agent can be plotted on charts and tables. More complex queries can also be defined, grouping multiple counters from different agents or different hosts on the same chart or table. A powerful syntax is provided for specifying counters to be plotted, described in more detail under "Defining Custom Views".

As described under "Monitoring Custom Data", user-defined agents and providers can also be created from the Console, and can be used along with the built-in agents.

Monitoring Session

In LivePerf all information related to a monitoring sesion (hosts, activated agents, counters plotted and so on) can be saved together as a session file (*.lperf).

When restoring a session LivePerf will attempt to connect to the same hosts and enable the same agents, while restoring the screen layout with all charts visible at the time when the session was saved.

Saving sessions is a convenient way to manage all your lists of hosts and configuration (such as database connection parameters etc) for each one.

Sampling Interval

An agent will send collected data regularly to the Console, with a frequency controlled by the Sampling Interval parameter.

The Sampling Interval is typically adjusted at Monitoring Session level by changing the value on the application toolbar. This value is propagated and used by all agents, unless overriden.

Setting Sampling Interval at Session level

Figure 3. Setting Sampling Interval at Session level

This setting can be overriden by an agent by unselecting the 'Default' interval checkbox. More complex agents also allow adjusting the sampling interval per entity.

Setting Sampling Interval at Agent level

Figure 4. Setting Sampling Interval at Agent level

Entities and Counters

In LivePerf counters are the basic performance elements, and they have an associated value that can be for example plotted on a chart. Counters are typically grouped under entities, which in turn are grouped hierarchically under an agent.

Agent, Entities and Counters

Figure 5. Agent, Entities and Counters

In the figure above you can see entities of the Windows agent, as well as the counters for the selected entity (.NET CLR Memory)

An agent will return data only for the counters which are enabled. To enable counters, click the checkbox next to them, then click 'Apply'. Enabling counters is also required for recording a session log: only data for enabled counters will be recorded. Note that when enabling a view or a dashboard (see "Views and Dashboards") all required counters are automatically enabled. This is also true for views which use regular expressions.

Counters can also be enabled by right-clicking any entity of an agent and selecting 'Enable All Counters' or 'Enable All Counters Recursively'. The recursive option will also enable all counters of all child entities. Dynamic counters (created during a monitoring session) will be created enabled if their parent entity was enabled in this way.

Some agents support the concept of Monitoring Level associated with their entities and counters. This allows the user to control the volume of information displayed, with higher levels resulting in more entities and counters present in agent's tree. If this is supported, markers will be displayed next to each entity to show the current level. Options are provided to control monitoring level per each entity, per subtree or per entire agent.

Views and Dashboards

A very powerful feature of LivePerf is the ability to group related counters, together with graphic display hints, into a single View object, easy to plot with one click. A view can group counters from the same agent entity (eg: Disk Reads, Disk Writes for a PhysicalDisk entity) as well as counters across multiple hosts (eg: Disk Reads for all monitored hosts).

Along with Views there are also Dashboards, which are groups of views and individual counters that can be plotted together, making it easy to display all relevant performance metrics for an entire system

Both views and dashboards can be found at any level in the monitoring session tree.

Views and dashboards can also be customized or created from scratch, see "Defining Custom Views".

To control the volume of information shown at a time on the screen, more dashboards can be placed under a Data View Screen and shown or hidden together. LivePerf creates an initial screen; more screens can be created later on using the tooolbar controls.

Data View Screen toolbar controls

Figure 6. Data View Screen toolbar controls