1. Copyright and Legal Notice

Copyright © 2002 IBM Corporation. All rights reserved.

This document is provided "AS IS," with no express or implied warranties. Use the information in this document at your own risk.

Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Other company, product, and service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute, and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover text, and no Back-Cover text. A copy of the license can be found at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.txt.

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2. What Is the Compaq Storage Performance Monitor?

The Compaq Storage Performance Monitor (CSPM), written by Don Dupuis of Compaq Computer Corporation, is a graphical tool that monitors read and write statistics on Linux® systems. CSPM monitors the system on a per disk, per controller, and systemwide basis. CSPM gathers all the data automatically and then generates a histogram display of system throughput and of every disk and controller. By default, CSPM monitors sectors and blocks. It can also monitor IOs, merges, and reads and writes.

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3. Requirements

This section describes the requirements for different versions of CSPM.

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4. Installing CSPM and its Requirements

This section describes how to acquire the Qt application development environment and install CSPM.

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5. Modifying CSPM Defaults

You can modify the default grid and monitoring settings by selecting Options-> Preferences. When you select the Options pulldown, you can view the Grid tab or the Monitor tab.

From the Grid tab you can change:

• the color of the grid lines

• the distance (or time), in seconds, between intervals when data is collected (horizontal lines appear at each interval)

• the color of the read and write lines

• the number of horizontal range bars (default is 5)

• the size of the histogram titles

From the Monitor tab you can change:

• the height and width of the display boxes (in pixels)

• the colors of the display boxes

• the type of data to be monitored (IOs, data, reads and writes, sectors and blocks)

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6. Interpreting CSPM Output

When you start up CSPM, a collection of histograms appears. Each histogram shows data for either a controller, disk, partition, or system throughput. The key at the bottom of the histogram tables tells which color of histogram box corresponds to which type of device. The following sample CSPM session shows controller (purple), disk (green), partition (orange), and system data.

Use the horizontal and vertical scroll bars to view controller, disk, and partition histograms that do not fit on the initial screen.

By default, the number of "range bars" along the y-coordinate of each histogram is five. When there is no activity for a particular device, CSPM provides default values of 0, 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, and 0.8. Once activity begins on the device, CSPM sets the five values in equal increments from 0 to the peak data value collected in each collection interval. Sometimes the grid lines fall directly on the range bar numbers, making the numbers hard to read. You can either adjust the color of the grid lines, adjust the collection interval, or try to ignore the grid lines.

To see information about a partition (such as filesystem name, space used, and space available), right-click on the partition's histogram and then left-click on Properties. A Partition Status window opens that displays information about the selected partition.

(This feature will be implemented for controllers and disks in a later release of CSPM.)