[geeks] AW YEAH

[Bill Bradford]

HP PerfView/Measureware, HP OpenView ServiceReporter,
and Seagate CrystalReports can ALL BOW TO ME.

(this is a happy rant)

It goes like this.  Months and months ago, we purchased
HP PV/MWA and ServiceReporter, with the assurance from HP
that yes, there would be a PerfView/Measureware agent for
Tru64 UNIX "any day now".  We got agents for all our other
boxes (Solaris), but have been waiting on the Tru64 one.

Couple of months ago, at least, HP comes to us and goes
"uh.  uhm.  there's not going to be a Tru64 agent after
all."  We go postal on them, because thats one of the reasons
we *bought* this product.

Couple of weeks later, our HP rep comes to us with DSI -
Data Source Integration.  Basically lets us gather the data
that we want to monitor (in this case, from sar, etc), log
it ourselves (in a format that is "hp approved"), and then
forward that data to a PerfView/Measureware agent on a box
that *has* the current supported PV/MWA agent.  Then, we can
use ServiceReporter to graph the data and get the outputs 
we'd have had if there was a native Tru64 agent.

(imagine this, its similar to using MRTG/RRDtool, but on a 
 much more complicated scale, basically)

Boss hands it to me and says "go for it".

One week in:  Okay, this DSI stuff blows chunks, but its all we've 
got.

Two weeks in:  Okay, DSI stuff is configured, systems are gathering
data.  Lets do reports!

Three weeks in:  HP guy says, "oh, yeah, in order to do custom reporting
from the DSI data sources, you'll need to buy CrystalReports to make
your own report templates, since all of ours are hardcoded."  (Service
Reporter uses an embedded CrystalReports engine).

Four weeks:  Send in PO for CrystalReports.  $399 or such.

Five weeks:  Got CrystalReports last week.  Fiddled with it.  Set up
test instance of ServiceReporter on my desktop NT box here to do 
development.

This week:  After fiddling all day, I finally just now got a 
report (doing the chart now) of one of the Tru64 boxes, and its
UserCPU, SysCPU, and FreeMEM every five minutes for the past
24 hours.  YES.

BOOYA.

DAMN STRAIGHT.

IT WORKS.

I RULE.

(I know, this is a funny thing to celebrate, but I've been working on
 this project for the past 2-3 months as 50% of my daily workload, and
 I finally got the tools I needed to do the job.. and it works RIGHT.)

What sucks is that ServiceReporter and CrystalReports dont run on a 
UNIX platform. 8-(

Okay, back to your reguarly scheduled stuff.  I just had to vent; I'm
so damn happy right now that this stuff works.

Bill

-- 
Bill Bradford
mrbill at mrbill.net
Austin, TX