Performance measurement facilities are among the vital things that mainframe users expect and Unix users are going to start demanding, and Hewlett-Packard Co’s Unix customers will shortly be able to get the feel of their machines thanks to a new product from the company, GlancePlus/UX, a package that measures system performance of the company’s multi-user minicomputers and workstations when running the company’s HP-UX Unix. The new product is designed to be used by system administrators to monitor system performance in multi-user, client-server and networked workstation environments and to provide concise information that can be used to isolate and resolve potential system performance bottlenecks. The company points out that while the generality of network management applications isolate faults, checking whether systems on a network are actually working, GlancePlus/UX measures how well the systems are working, providing a hierarchy of performance data from a quick summary to diagnostic detail, and graphically displays information on CPU, disk, memory and swap-space usage. The metrics used are based on the company’s Measurement Interface, a source of HP-UX kernel information for characterisation of system performance. It joins LaserRX/UX, which measures performance from an historical perspective, and RXForecast, for capacity forecasting in Hewlett-Packard’s armoury, and there is also a GlancePlus/XL version for the proprietary MPE/XL operating system on HP 3000s. GlancePlus/UX is expected to be available in December for all HP 9000 computers running HP-UX 7.0 up, and will cost from $500 to $10,000.
