SCO Doctor User Guide

Chapter 2, Views

Overview

Select View, Overview.

System Overview

Function:

To provide an overview of the entire system's performance and status.

Description:

The overview has been designed as your dashboard for systems management. It includes a set of key statistics which measure the overall health of your system. The graph displays various load factors which indicate which subsystem or portion of the system is experiencing the greatest load. The load bars scale from 0 to 100%.
The overview will highlight which subsystem is causing any bottleneck and the degree to which it is impacting system performance. A system will only run as fast as its slowest component, consequently, your tuning methodology should begin with the subsystem that is placing the greatest load on the system. Once identified, you can use other views which provide more detail on that facet of the system. This drill-down approach, from the general to the specific, usually proves very effective in determining system bottlenecks.

Data Fields:

System - The name of the system which is currently being monitored.

Date - The current date on the system being monitored.

Users - The number of users currently logged on the system.

Processes - The number of processes currently running on the system.

Tunables - A description of the adequacy of configurable operating system tunable parameters which provides an amalgamated representation of all tunable parameters on a graduated scale: excess, comfortable, moderate, low, critical.

These descriptions have the following meanings:

excess - An excess of tunable resources are configured.
comfortable - Sufficient resources are configured.
moderate - Ideal configuration.
low - Resources are low and should be increased.
critical - The system is in danger of failing.

Last Boot - When the system was last booted.

Last Alert - The name of the last alert routine run.

When - The time at which the last alert routine was run.

Load Factors:

system - The weighted average of all the load factors. This average takes into account which subsystems have the greatest impact on system performance and weights them appropriately. Swap load is accorded the highest weight, then disk, memory and finally cpu. Tunable and diskusage are not included as they do not directly impact system load.

cpu - CPU load. For multiprocessing systems, this is the average of all CPUs.

memory - Total memory load. This indicates the load on the system specifically induced by inadequate memory.

disk - Disk load. This is a measure of the disk load as a percentage of the maximum attainable disk throughput.

swap - Swapping/Paging load. This factor indicates the swapping and paging load as a percentage of the maximum reasonable swapping and paging load.

tunable - Resource usage. This is an average of the usage for all the tunable parameters monitored by SCO Doctor. For a complete list of these parameters refer to the SCO Doctor Technical Reference.

fsspace - Disk space used. This is an average of the disk space used in all file systems.