Transcript No Slide Title

Session 5823:
Working with Windows NT
Performance Data
Paul Jaffray
Technical Services Manager
Promedica Health System, Inc.
Wednesday March 6th, 2002
Abstract
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“Real world” look at working with NT performance data
Application of MVS techniques to NT
High level overview of NT performance data
Tools used for collection and analysis
What data do we look at
Discussion – What does everyone else do?
Intro
• I am not an expert on NT or Performance
• I took my experience from managing SMF data on
MVS and creating various performance reports for the
mainframe and applied those processes to NT
• I am still learning how NT works and what the various
counters represent
• Still developing ROTs for various counters
What Data Is Available?
• Various Performance Objects
– Each object contains related Performance Counters
• Processor:% Processor Time
• Processor:Interrupts/Sec
• Processor:DPC Rate
• Lots and lots of counters
– But how good is the data?
Performance Objects
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Processor
System
Memory
Network Interface
Physical Disk
Process
Print Queue
Server
Thread
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MSExchangeDB
MSExchangeDS
MSExchangeMTA
Lotus.Notes.MTA
SQLServer
SQLServer:Databases
AppleTalk
ADSM Client Performance
ColdFusion Server
What’s Missing
• No response time counters
– Exchange
• Delivery times are available
– SQL
• Transactions per Second
How Can I View the Data?
• Task Manager
– Real Time
– Local machine only
– Provides summary performance data
– Not customizable
– How to start:
• Right-click the task bar and select Task Manager
• Crtl-Alt-Del and select Task Manager
How Can I View the data?
• Performance Monitor
– Real time or historical via logs
– Also has alerting facility
– Local machine or remote
– You can select which objects and counters to view
– How to start:
• Start:Run:PERFMON
• Start:Programs:Administrative Tools:Performance
So Now What?
I wanted a way to consolidate performance data from
every server to a single point and combine into a daily
file for processing. This file should then be saved where
it can be combined into a monthly file. A number of
daily files and all monthly files should be archived so
they can be retrieved and reported against in the future.
Challenges
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No SMF facility standard with Windows
No IFASMFDP or DFSORT
No JCL/TSO/ISPF
How to automate
How to locate and copy the data
How to handle and report errors
How to analyze data and create reports
Solution (so far)
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NTSMF
PrimalScript
VBScript code
Scheduled Tasks
Text file with a list of servers with data location
SAS
MXG
Creating the “SMF” Files
• On each server NTSMF gets data from standard NT interfaces,
builds records and writes them to a “current” file
• NTSMF Directory Structure
– C:\NTSMF\Data\Current
• Holds active file
– C:\NTSMF\Data\Previous
• Yesterday’s data file(s)
– C:\NTSMF\Data\Archive
• Settable number of days worth of data
Gathering The Data
• A script, driven by a list of servers to collect from,
looks for files on each of those servers where the date
in the file name is equal to yesterday’s date and copies
those files to a directory on the system the script is
running on
• All files are combined together in a single daily file
that is available locally for SAS/MXG processing and
is copied to a server for archival and later
consolidation
Error Logging
• Status messages are written to the NT Application Log
– Start and Stop times for the script
– Servers not found
– Data not found
• Messages are also gathered together and emailed to me
as the last step in the script
Reporting On the Data
• Processing can be done with SAS on MVS or
Windows
• MXG provides SAS Macros to process the raw
NTSMF data into SAS observations
• SAS can then be used to summarize and report on the
data
Some Gotcha’s
• Cross domain trusts
– Must be in place to copy files from servers in other
domains
• Permissions
– File access
– Registry updates
Some Gotcha’s
• A crashed server can dump several K worth of nulls
onto the end of a .smf file
• These nulls cause SAS to stop processing the file
• If they exist in the daily file they have to found and
removed
Some Gotcha’s
• Disk performance numbers must be turned on by
issuing the diskperf command from the command
prompt
– C:\> diskperf –yv
• Some network numbers require Network Monitoring
Agent to be installed
Some Gotcha’s
• Memory:Page Faults/Sec
– Can be very misleading as it includes Transition
faults
– Should use Memory:Page Reads/Sec
• Accurate reflection of demand paging
Some Gotcha’s
• Microsoft’s Outlook security patch in response to the
“ILOVEYOU” virus broke the email part of my initial
script
– New version of script requires the SMTP service to
be loaded on the machine that runs the script
Some Gotcha’s
• Manually have to maintain the Server List file
– Can be coordinated with the setting of the NTSMF
options that must be set once the collector software
has been loaded
What Numbers Do We
Look At?
• Daily – 3 reports
– Configuration report
• Shows all servers we collect data from and their
configuration
– Disk Numbers
• Free space shortages and high queuing
– System Hourly Summaries
• Hourly report for each server of key values
What Numbers Do We
Look At?
• Processor:% Processor Time
– Looking for busy processors
– SQL based applications seem to suffer at 60%
– Others?
• System:Processor Queue Length
– Indicates work waiting for CPU
• Doesn’t seem to work like I would expect
What Numbers Do We
Look At?
• Memory:Available Bytes
– Shows physical memory installed but not used by
operating system or application
– Large number indicates an over-configured server
• Memory:Page Reads/sec
– Actual page faults resulting in a page in from disk
– Page Faults/sec counter is misleading
– Should be less than 200/sec?
What Numbers Do We
Look At?
• PhysicalDisk:Avg. Disk Queue Length
– How backed up is the IO subsystem
– Shouldn’t be greater than 3 or 4?
• PhysicalDisk:Disk Bytes/sec
– How much data is being moved
– How much is too much depends on the interface
What Numbers Do We
Look At?
• PhysicalDisk:Avg. Disk Sec/Read
– Average number of seconds per read
– Less than 20ms – good, more – bad
• PhysicalDisk:Avg. Disk Sec/Write
– Same as above except for writes
Discussion
• Comments
• Questions
• What are others doing?
Tools –
NTSMF
• Windows NT/2000 performance data collector
• Creates “SMF” files containing records of selected
performance counters
• Demand Technology Software
www.demandtech.com
Tools –
PrimalScript
• “The professional scripting environment of choice for
developers working in any scripting language”
• Useful for working with VBScript
• SAPIEN Technologies Inc.
www.sapien.com
Tools –
SAS
• Data Access/Management/Analysis/Presentation Tool
• Allows processing and summerization of raw data
• SAS Institute Inc.
www.sas.com
Tools –
MXG
• “SAS-based software package that processes the
"SMF" data records created by computer operating
systems”
• Turns raw data into observations in SAS datasets
• Merrill Consultants
www.mxg.com
Some Books
• Microsoft Windows 2000 Performance Tuning
Technical Reference
– ISBN 0-7356-0633-1
• Windows 2000 Performance Guide
– ISBN 1565924665
• Tuning Netfinity Servers for Performance
– IBM Redbook / ISBN 0-13-040612-0