Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!comp.vuw.ac.nz!actrix!paul From: paul@actrix.gen.nz (Paul Gillingwater) Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp Subject: Re: LaserRX Message-ID: <1991Feb5.205933.8145@actrix.gen.nz> Date: 5 Feb 91 20:59:33 GMT References: Distribution: comp Organization: Actrix Information Exchange Lines: 59 Comment-To: wayne@dsndata.uucp In article wayne@dsndata.uucp (Wayne Schlitt) writes: > i just got a flier from HP about their LaserRX product, and i have a > few questions that i hope someone can answer... Your questions are reasonable. > 1) why is it called LaserRX? it doesnt seem to have anything to do > with lasers (or cdroms or read/write optical disks which use > lasers). It does require a CD-ROM player on a PC to operate. I don't know why they packaged it like this, but that's the way it is. It's also not a new product, at least in the sense that it has been around for MPE, HP's proprietary O/S, for a while. I guess they've just ported it to HP-UX. > > 2) i have a nice hp9000/370 sitting on my desk. why am i supposed to > buy a pc in order to run LaserRX? (and, of course, i would have Your PC can do something that your 9000 can't do very well: run MS-Windows, which is what LaserRX requires. > 3) what does LaserRX give me that the hp monitor, uptime, iostat, > vmstat and unix accounting doesnt already give me? the only think i > can think of that they show is pretty color graphs... gee, you > would think X windows could do that, but... HP have at least three new performance tools for HP-UX. Glance Plus/UX is for "snapshots", and replaces the unsupported monitor(1M). It's a lot more user friendly than the other utilities, such as sar(1M-800only), iostat and vmstat. Laser RX/UX reads the same info as Glance Plus/UX, but saves it in a log file. It also can be configured to watch particular applications. Its main function is to log system activity over a period of time, which monitor and the other tools won't do (unless you put them in shell wrappers). The third tool is ForecastRX, which uses the information collected by LaserRX to forecast trends and make recommendations. I agree that I'd like to see the graphs under X. I think HP were leveraging off the fact they'd written most of that stuff already for MS-Windows on the MPE version. > having come from a mainframe background, i have always been _real_ > disappointed with the primitive system performance analysis tools that > unix has. I think you'll find that the three new tools address exactly that concern. They're the best I've seen from *any* vendor. > the most important one that is missing is some way of figure out how > much i/o is going a given file or directory structures so you can > figure out how you should split your file system over a series of disk ... > across a bunch of disks. will LaserRX help me do this? No, I think you want Glance Plus/UX for that. -- Paul Gillingwater, paul@actrix.gen.nz