OS Watcher (OSW) is a collection of UNIX shell scripts intended to collect and archive operating system and network metrics to aid support in diagnosing performance issues. OSW operates as a set of background processes on the server and gathers OS data on a regular basis, invoking such Unix utilities as vmstat, netstat and iostat. OSW can be downloaded from this metalink note “Doc ID: 301137.1 OS Watcher User Guide ”.
OSW consists of a series of shell scripts. OSWatcher.sh is the main controlling executive, which spawns individual shell processes to collect specific kinds of data, using Unix operating system diagnostic utilities. Control is passed to individually spawned operating system data collector processes, which in turn collect specific data, timestamp the data output, and append the data to pre-generated and named files. Each data collector will have its own file, created and named by the File Manager process.
Data collection intervals are configurable by the user, but will be uniform for all data collector processes for a single instance of the OSW tool. For example, if OSW is configured to collect data once per minute, each spawned data collector process will generate output for its respective metric, write data to its corresponding data file, then sleep for one minute (or other configured interval) and repeat. Because we are collecting data every minute, the files generated by each spawned processes will contain 60 entries, one for each minute during the previous hour. Each file will contain, at most, one hour of data. At the end of each hour, File Manager will wake up and copy the existing current hour file to an archive location, then create a new current hour file.
The File Manager ensures only the last N hours of information are retained, where N is a configurable integer defaulting to 48. File Manager will wake up once per hour to delete files older than N hours. At any time, the entire output file set will consist of one current hour file, plus N archive files for each data collector process.
OSW invokes these distinct operating system utilities, each as a distinct background process, as data collectors. These utilities will be supported, or their equivalents, as available for each supported target platform.
- ps
- top
- mpstat
- iostat
- netstat
- traceroute
- vmstat
You can refer to metalink document “Doc ID: 580513.1 How To Start OSWatcher Every System Boot ” to automatically start the data collection on system boot.
