Welcome to my collect page


I no longer maintain collect -- in fact no one is maintaining collect, or, for that matter, Tru64 any more. Tru64 is dead, haven't you heard?


December, 2003

Bernard Laforgue has made a kit available to install the old Perl-based collgui version on Tru64 UNIX V5.1B. There is also a readme for this kit.


Version 2.0 Information

The V2.0 kit has a few problems, some of which I have fixed.
Go to my Collect V2.0 Page for details.


Introduction

collect is an tool to collect operating system and process data under Digital UNIX, versions 3, 4, and 5.

It is intended

collect gathers data for 'subsystems', which are
  • process
  • memory
  • disk
  • tape

  • lsm
  • network
  • cpu

  • tty
  • filesystems
  • message queue
  • data can be collected for any combination of subsystems.

    collect has two modes: collection and playback. In collection mode, it gathers operating system and process data, and writes it to standard output, to a binary file with a special format, or to both.

    In playback mode, collect reads from a previously written binary file and writes to standard output. The format of the data when written to standard output is identical, whether in collection or playback mode.

    Look here for an example of collect output.

    Digital UNIX versions

    Collect runs on version 3, 4, and 5 (steel) of Digital UNIX. Because Digital UNIX has been evolving, some statistics, specifically for disks, have first become available in V4 or even V5. You should not expect to all fields to be meaningful for V3 or V4. In particular, in V3 only the fields R/S, RKB/S, W/S, and WKB/S are valid. In V4 AVS, ACTQ, and %BSY contain data, but they are known not to be reliable. The fields AVW, WTQ, and %WT are zero. A patch will soon (Nov, '98) be available for V4 which will finally make the disk statistics reliable. Currently, only in V5 are all fields valid.

    Associated Tools

    Accompanying collect, are two highly-integrated tools, collgui, a graphical front-end, and cfilt, which allows almost completely arbitrary extraction of data from the output of collect to standard output. cfilt is not just a tool for collgui to use, though. It formats the requested values in a one-line-per-sample format, space delimited, which can be imported, for example, into an EXCEL spreadsheet effortlessly. See the cfilt manual page for more information.

    collgui is a labor-saving tool which allows a user to quickly analyze collect data. Behind the scenes, it spawns collect in playback mode (you must have a binary collect file) to read the collect data. This is filtered by cfilt. Finally, the output from cfilt is fed to gnuplot, a public-domain plotting utility, which can display graphs in a variety of ways, including X11, PostScript, and PPM (portable Pixmap).

    Perl

    Because collgui and cfilt are both perl scripts, and collgui is additionally dependent on the perl Tk extension, if you want to use these tools, you must have Perl, and additionally, you must have the Perl/Tk extension to run collgui. If you don't have Perl and Perl/Tk, I strongly recommend you get and install one of the setld perl/tk kits that I have made available. This is a complete perl kit and has no dependencies on collect. Therefore you can use it completely independently of collect.


    The following topics are available for more information:


    Rob Urban <urban (at) unix-beratung (dot) de>