• What is the difference between the Simple System Monitoring Application and SunMC?

    • SunMC mostly monitors hardware. It also allows you to manipulate the machine being monitored from the monitoring program. The Simple System Monitoring Application measures the load exerted by software on a particular machine. Also, you cannot manipulate the target machine from the Simple System Monitoring Application web page. You must log onto the target machine to make any changes.

  • Can I see what the Simple System Monitoring Application looks like without installing the software?

    Yes, simply go to http://canary.central/canary/cgi-bin/canary.cgi.

  • Can external customers use this tool? The plan is to get the Simple System Monitoring Application tool into the hands of external customers. Two methods of doing this are being discussed.

    (1) Make the Simple System Monitoring Application into a product. (2) Give the Simple System Monitoring Application away for free as part of the Open Solaris program. Which of these two methods we will pick is still under discussion.

  • I don't want to install any software on my target systems. can I still use the Simple System Monitoring Application ?

    Yes, there is an option to configure the software to run exclusively on the destination (web server) system. This approach has some performance and security concerns but will function adequately in scenarios where you are monitoring a small number of systems. The instructions on how to set this up will be detailed in the User's manual.

  • My CPU load is 100%. I killed all the runaway programs but the CPU load indicator is still red. Why?

    It takes a while for the Simple System Monitoring Application to cycle through it's update/processing cycle. You should see the indictor change within 5-10 minutes if your change fixed the problem. The graphs are on a somewhat longer cycle and can take up to 30 minutes to be redrawn with new data.

  • Is this just a tool for monitoring Sun Ray servers?

    The Simple System Monitoring Application was designed and "tuned" to solve that problem. However, you can use it to monitor the performance of any Solaris or Linux server. In fact, with some modification. the Simple System Monitoring Application could be run on HP-UX and AIX as well.

  • How do I interpret the graphs?

    That topic will be covered in the User's manual.  As a general rule of thumb, compare the graphs of the "problem" system with that of a similar system that is functioning well.  The relevant graphs will be obvious.

  • What is the significance of the number of users logged onto multiple Sun Rays?

    Do to some software issues courrently being addressed you could log out of a Sun Ray, but not have all of your processes terminated. These left over processes many times are consuming CPU load. You, the user, are unaware that this is happening. The mutiple Sun Ray user report helps you to see how many servers you are currently logged into.

  • Why show the automounts?

    If you do not add the nobrowse option to the /etc/init.d/autofs file. You could be inadvertently mounting many directories that are not needed. These extra automounts can severely affect performance. An example is instead of seeing 100-200 /home directories mounted, you could see 44,000 if you are on a Sun campus

  • What is the "low hanging fruit" to go after first when using this tool?

    Go after runaway programs first.  Then, check to make sure that you are not inadvertently automounting many unnecessary directories.  Compare the graphs for a system  during the weekday and then over the weekend.  If CPU load and number of users doesn't drop to around zero, there are other issues top deal with. Look for abnormal network traffic on either the individual network cards or on the TCP stats graph.