PRM Product Overview

occur. The Glanceplus application resource alarm can send an e-mail or page to the system

administrator.

Integration with HP-UX commands

HP developed PRM. PRM is implemented with tight integration with the HP-UX kernel. In addition,

various HP-UX commands have been enhanced to support PRM. Some commands, such as id and

ps, display PRM group information. Other commands, such as cron and login, ensure jobs or

processes are assigned to the correct PRM groups. Also, system calls such as exec and fork ensure

processes start in the correct PRM groups.

Integration with HP-UX accounting

HP-UX has excellent accounting features. For instance, you can log the resources consumed by every

process that ran on the system. As an example, the total CPU resources consumed by every process

can be logged. These accounting logs are particularly useful as input for chargeback applications.

With application consolidation, you might have situations in which multiple business units are sharing

a common server. Accounting and chargeback applications become even more important with

application consolidation. Tracking usage and charging back resources consumed by a PRM group is

usually much more efficient and meaningful than charging on a per-process or per-user basis.

PRM has a utility called prmanalyze for integrating accounting information and resource use. This

utility scans accounting files for information on the desired resource type (disk, memory, or CPU) and

orders the accounting records by the requested sort key (user, UNIX group, command name, or

PRMID). You can use prmanalyze to find patterns in resource usage and then change your PRM

configurations accordingly.

In addition, you can use prmanalyze—even when you are not using PRM—to perform resource use

analysis and capacity planning.

With prmanalyze, you can generate three classes of reports:

• Summary—This report shows who consumes the resources and what the averages are on a high

level. It can help you identify what users or applications must be restrained or guaranteed more

resources. This report can be used when creating a new PRM configuration.

• Time-based (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly)—These reports provide data on resource use over a

given time for all the available accounting data. These reports can help you determine what part of

the day (or hour, week, or month) each resource is most used. They also identify the users and

applications involved in the resource consumption. These reports can be used when enhancing an

initial configuration to give special attention to users or applications. Also, they can be used when

creating multiple configurations to implement at different times over a given interval.

• Conflict—This report provides the most detail, highlighting only the instances when resources are

scarce and users are in conflict. This report can be used when fine-tuning a configuration. This

report catches items that are missed by the time-based reports. After identifying conflicts, you can

determine how much resource each PRM group needed during each conflict and then determine

what share of the resource the PRM group actually received. With this data, you can locate users

and applications that are not getting as much of the resource as they should. You can also locate

the parties involved most often and least often in the conflicts.

Example: Checking for patterns and configuration accuracy

This example shows output from the prmananlyze command. The example assumes a single-core

system.

Regularly examine daily reports for patterns and configuration accuracy. For reports on recent data,

add the -p flag to catch jobs that never exit or that run for several days.