Performance data from topasout <topas_cec recording>

Starting from AIX 5.3 TL 05 it is possible to activate an automatic collection of performance information of an entire partitioned system from a single AIX image. The topas process is in charge of data collection and it can be automatically started at boot time adding the following line in /etc/inittab:

topasrec:2:once:/usr/bin/topas -R 2>&1 >/dev/null # Start topas recording

Every day the process stores data into a binary file named topas_cec.<YYMMDD> in /etc/perf. A new file is created every day. In order to limit disk space usage, only current week data is retained and older files are deleted. You should copy data files if you need to store them for a longer period.

The topasout command is used to extract data from the binary file and format the output in several ways. In order to use pGraph, just use the following syntax:

topasout <binary file>

The command will create a new text file in the same directory of the binary file with the name <binary file>_01. This file can be read by pGraph either in interactive-mode and in batch mode.

pGraph extracts CPU data from the file and creates the following performance graphs:

• Average CPU statistics (User, System, Wait, Idle) for each host.
• Physical CPU usage for each host, if it is a micro partition.
• The sum of physical CPU usage of all micro partitions, if present.
• The shared free pool size.

Single file

When pGraph reads a single topas_cec file, it provides the GUI shown by the following figure:

The same set of information is provided in batch mode.

Multiple files

In order to make pGraph manage multiple days of data you should concatenate the topas_cec files and make pGraph read the result. An easy way to merge the files is to use the cat command:

cat file1 file2 file3 > merged-file