As you know, SarCheck analyzes the output of sar, ps, and our agent which collects data on things like DNLC hits/misses and the values of tunable parameters. Some of our customers have asked us to build a tool that can help them to see what's happening at the level of Solaris Zones and we have a new tool called ZoneHound which is designed to do that. The really cool thing is that we have built ZoneHound so that its functions complement those of SarCheck and its output can be analyzed by SarCheck. There is an example of ZoneHound's output on the ZoneHound web site, and here is a look at a piece of the analysis of that output performed by a version of SarCheck that we're still working on.

There were 3 zones reported by the zonehound utility. The zone 
"development" averaged more CPU usage than all of the others combined. 
The zone "development" also used more memory than any other zone. 

The CPU usage of zone "global" averaged 8.55 percent of a single CPU and 
memory usage averaged 116.48 megabytes as reported by the RSS column of 
the ps utility. There were an average of 54.5 processes running in this 
zone. No processes were waiting for the CPU and no zombie processes 
were seen. 

The CPU usage of zone "development" averaged 35.47 percent of a single 
CPU and memory usage averaged 197.04 megabytes as reported by the RSS 
column of the ps utility. There were an average of 62.3 processes 
running in this zone. No processes were waiting for the CPU and an 
average of 0.20 zombie processes were seen during the peak interval. 

The CPU usage of zone "production" averaged 6.74 percent of a single CPU 
and memory usage averaged 83.24 megabytes as reported by the RSS column 
of the ps utility. There were an average of 43.0 processes running in 
this zone. No processes were waiting for the CPU and no zombie 
processes were seen.

If you're running Solaris 10 and you're using zones, you'll want to check this out. There are more expensive tools that let you drill down and do a lot of very detailed analysis, but if your question is really something like "Which zone is using all of the CPU?", then this might be a good answer. And if you've already got SarCheck on the system, now with ZoneHound, you can get the answer incorporated into the SarCheck report.

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