Chapter 1, Getting Started
A Quick Case Study
Imagine you are the systems administrator of a UNIX® Systems server. You have just received some complaints from users about the poor performance of the system. For the sake of this example, assume that you have not received any alert notices yet.
Select Overview to get an overall picture of the system's performance.
Overview
You notice that CPU usage is at 100% while all other system values seem to be within normal range. You can confirm the CPU is a bottle-neck by selecting the View, System, Bottleneck menu option. This view confirms your suspicion.
System Bottleneck View
It is now necessary to nail down which process is consuming the CPU and which user is responsible. The View, Processes, Active CPU menu option will display the CPU usage of each running process. By paging throughout the graph, it should be easy to spot which process is consuming the CPU resource. You notice there is a process called tetris consuming 87% of the CPU!
Process CPU View
But this program should not be used during work hours! Who would be using the program? Select the View, Processes, By User, CPU Usage menu option.
CPU By User View
You instantly notice that user Brad is consuming 91% of the CPU. Perhaps a quick phone call and the problem is solved. Alternatively, you may wish to kill the program. Go back to the Active CPU view and scroll down to highlight the program tetris. Select the Tools, Kill Process menu option to kill the process. To prevent a recurrence of this problem,
the rogue_process_cpu alert may be configured to automatically warn users and optionally kill such programs. It is possible to configure an alert to detect the running of the tetris process, or any other process, with automatic killing of the process, if required.