[Orca-users] (no subject)

[David Michaels]

theo at amimo.net wrote:
> Could anybody assist me in implementing orcallator on windows. I 
> currently have it set up on a Solaris 10 platform and would like to be 
> able to generate files and rsync them back to the unix box. My 
> question is how do I go about modifying my orcallator.cfg file and 
> also is there anything special I should do on the windows boxes or 
> perform?
>  
> I am a registered user, please inform me if this is not the standard 
> way to ask for assistance.

What I've done on Windows (2000) is to use their perfmon utility with 
specific settings based on what I want to capture.  I specify the 
logfile location as a Samba share running on one of my unix servers.  
Using a cron job on that system, I sync the data over to the same place 
all my Unix data lives, under a directory called 'winallator'.  Orca 
then processes this data the same way it does with all the Unix data.

At the time, I had to apply a winallator that came with Orca (see the 
data_gatherers/winallator directory of the tarball), though I had to 
tweak that patch a fair amount.  I believe those tweaks are now included 
in the latest snapshot, so you should have them (they're in the patch 
file in that data_gatherers/winallator directory).

The README in that directory explains how to set up Windows "perfmon".  
It also says that the patched Orca will process Windows files, but "may 
not process other data files," but I think that's somewhat out of date. 
The portions of the patch I contributed should allow one Orca 
installation to process either Unix or Windows data files.  My current 
implementation does this without much trouble.

The Windows "perfmon" utility will allow you to import settings for a 
"counter" from an HTML file.  To import a file, right-click the blank 
space that appears in the "Counter Logs" section of the Computer 
Management application (see the README for more on that app).  Choose 
"New Settings From...", and you will be prompted for a file to import.  
For your convenience, I have attached two files that "perfmon" can 
import that I use in my environment.  After you import these files, you 
will need to change the UNC path used to store the perfmon output.  If 
your Windows machines cannot write to your Unix server, because of lack 
of Samba or an NFS client, you will need to store them somewhere, and 
then figure out a way to get the files to the Unix box via some other 
method external to perfmon.

One caveat on perfmon -- it will not normally re-start after a reboot. 
You have to set the capture duration to 1 day, and the start time to any 
date in the past for it to automatically restart the service on reboot, 
but even then, sometimes it will not start automatically.  I have a cron 
job that monitors those directories, and any time the data looks stale, 
I get a page with a list of hosts that have stale data.  If anyone knows 
how to force perfmon to auto-start, let me know.

The "Winallator" html files I have attached already have the above 
settings configured, I believe.  But I've noticed that sometimes, 
particularly after Microsoft OS patches are applied, the start-time of 
this collection gets reset from whatever date you selected to "Manual".  
This causes them not to auto-start.  I'm then forced to use Computer 
Manager to (remotely) modify the settings on the collection log named 
"Winallator" for each machine.

Hope this helps!

-- 

--Dragon
"draco nemo omnibus horis sapit"
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