SarCheck will find a few bugs in the sar utility, so here's the FAQ section from the manual. These questions make up 80 percent of our support calls.
Q: What versions of AIX does SarCheck support?
A: We support AIX 4.3 and up. One binary works with both 32- and 64-bit versions of AIX. We expect to split SarCheck for AIX into two products, one will support 4.3 and 5.1, and the other will support 5.2 and 5.3. The reason for this is because older versions use the vmtune and schedtune utilities to monitor and tune the system, and the newer systems use vmo, ioo, and schedo. We can make the parsing routines much more efficient and can improve our QA by moving the older code into its own version of the software.
Q: If I have other kinds of UNIX systems, can I try SarCheck on those too?
A: Sure! Fill out our order form and we'll send you eval copies of our released products. SarCheck is also available for Solaris SPARC 2.5 and up, HP-UX versions 10 and 11, and Linux Kernels 2.2 through 2.6. Even if your primary platform is AIX, we encourage you to try SarCheck on other platforms so that you can see what it does and understand what we want to do to help AIX sys admins.
Q. Why doesn't SarCheck tell me about my disks?
A. SarCheck uses sar to collect data on disk activity and only the latest versions of sar do this. Unfortunately, it's taken AIX a long time to implement disk monitoring in sar and this is one reason why we delayed porting SarCheck to AIX until the summer of 2000. Some older versions of AIX still have trouble with disk statistics but we'll analyze the information if it's present.
Q. Should I implement recommendations which only show up occasionally?
A. Feel free to try, but implement the regularly occurring recommendations first, since those will address the most frequently occurring problems. If SarCheck occasionally recommends increasing the amount of memory, you should certainly try it. On systems with some extra memory, SarCheck will be able to make additional recommendations that could not be made on systems where memory is “tight”. Please remember that recommendations made by beta software (or even recommendations made by an expert) should make sense to you before you try them.
Q. Every time I make changes based on SarCheck’s recommendations, it makes more recommendations. Why doesn't it just figure out the correct values for all the parameters?
A. That’s not how real performance tuning works. There are no “correct” values because tuning is a series of compromises between various system resources. Performance tuning involves a certain degree of trial and error, and gradual change is the only way to do it.
Q. When I try to run sarcheck, I get the message “sarcheck: not found”. What’s wrong?
A. Check the following:
Q. Why did SarCheck stop producing reports?
A. The software has probably expired. Run '/usr/local/bin/analyze' and look for the expiration date at the bottom of the usage text. If you've licensed SarCheck and the expiration date doesn't make sense to you, run 'analyze -s' and send us the output.
Q. How do I collect data over a 24 hour period?
A. The crontab entries should look like this:
0 * * * * /usr/lib/sa/sa1 1200 3 & 50 23 * * 1-5 /usr/lib/sa/sa2 -i 1200 -A &
Q. How do I collect data every 10 minutes from 08:00 to 18:00?
A. The crontab entries should look like this:
0 8-17 * * 1-5 /usr/lib/sa/sa1 600 6 & 0 18-7 * * 1-5 /usr/lib/sa/sa1 & 5 18 * * 1-5 /usr/lib/sa/sa2 -s 8:00 -e 18:01 -i 600 -A &
If you have any problems, contact us!
Back to the SarCheck home page