Performance statistics aggregation

[Clint Byrum]

Excerpts from Bouchard Louis's message of Fri Jun 17 05:36:31 -0700 2011:
> Hello,
> 
> Le 17/06/2011 14:00, ubuntu-server-request at lists.ubuntu.com a écrit :
> > Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2011 17:02:37 +0200
> > From: Nicolas Barcet <nick.barcet at canonical.com>
> > To: ubuntu-server <ubuntu-server at lists.ubuntu.com>
> > Subject: Performance statistics aggregation
> > Message-ID: <4DFA1B0D.7030306 at canonical.com>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
> > 
> > I think it would be good to have the server community's opinion on what
> > should be our preferred performance statistics aggregation solution in
> > Ubuntu.  The 2 main contenders would be ganglia [1] and collectd [2],
> > but something even better might be out there that I do not know about.
> > 
> > [1] http://ganglia.sourceforge.net/
> > [2] http://collectd.org/
> > 
> > Thoughts?
> > Nick
> > 
> 
> This is interesting as it is a topic that I brought up just before UDS-O
> with my support colleagues. This might be somewhat off-topic with Nick's
> request, but close enough to the topic to be worth mentioning.
> 
> Right now, unlike other enterprise distributions, no performance data of
> any kind is collected automatically. While this is understandable on a
> Desktop system, such data is quite useful in on a server.
> 
> Especially when time comes to deal with customer complains on the fact
> that  such and such upgrade did have a negative impact on performances.
> Without historical performance data, investigation of such claims are
> almost impossible.
> 
> Some distributions have used SAR, which is part of sysstat. Other
> lightweight solutions exists, like collectl (L and not D) which lives at
> http://collectl.sourceforge.net. Those two only take care of collecting
> the data and do nothing about displaying it.

I've always liked sysstat for this, as its almost totally invisible
in terms of system load but has a wealth of information for diagnosing
chronic problems. As was pointed out elsewhere, this doesn't show you the
brief spikes, but getting those involves a lot more data collection. :-P

So if a customer is taken on, then installing something like sysstat
should be one of the first recommendations.

Of course, there's also Landscape, if you're so inclined to hand over
a little cash, you get a lot of this built in (and a lot more ;)