 Managing
Solaris with Kstat
Alexander Golomshtok and Yefim Nodelman
October 2001
Rapidly increasing demand for high-performance, mission-critical computer
systems and especially the proliferation of Internet-based business applications
gave birth to thousands of commercial and public-domain performance management
solutions. Solaris, being a very mature operating environment with significant
install base, enjoys the attention of many performance management software vendors
and independent developers. Available tools range from very simple standalone
programs, designed to monitor just a few aspects of the system's behavior,
to very complex distributed systems with built-in troubleshooting, trend analysis,
and forecasting capabilities.
Perhaps one of the most well-known commercial performance management solutions
for all UNIX flavors is BMC Patrol 1. Patrol is a multi-tiered
system, capable of not only monitoring various aspects of system performance,
but also advanced modeling and impact analysis. Although a good choice for enterprise-wide
performance monitoring, Patrol may be an overkill for those who just wish to
quickly address particular performance concerns -- its distributed architecture,
complexity, and especially the licensing costs may be prohibitive to small organizations
looking for a comprehensive low-cost and low-maintenance solution. Other vendors,
including Sun Microsystems itself, offer sophisticated performance monitoring
and management tools for Solaris, but unfortunately, sophistication comes at
the price of complexity and high acquisition and maintenance costs 2.
As a low-cost alternative to commercial performance-monitoring tools, free
software enthusiasts have developed quite a few performance-monitoring applications
for UNIX and Solaris in particular.
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