HP Pay per use (PPU) User's Guide for versions 8.x > Appendix A Special Considerations

PPU Percent Utilization Information Verification (HP-UX)

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Your PPU system’s core utilization information is available from the HP PPU web portal. See “PPU Web Portal” for details of the PPU web portal.

If you want to verify PPU percent utilization information against the PPU web portal information, use the sar command to compare core utilization numbers. The sar command is an HP-UX system activity reporter that samples and accumulates core utilization. Refer to the sar (1M) manpage for details on the sar command.

An overview of the core utilization verification process is:

  1. Create core utilization numbers for your PPU system with the sar command.

  2. Go to the PPU web portal and capture core utilization numbers for the same PPU system and duration of time.

  3. Verify the sar utilization numbers against the PPU web portal utilization numbers.

Use the following procedure to perform the utilization verification process:

NOTE: Because the PPU web portal’s utilization reports contain 30 minutes of information, beginning on the hour or on the half hour, perform Step 1 immediately at the start of a hour, or at half-past the hour. Another option is to create a shell script that contains the command in Step 1 and schedule a cron job so it starts exactly on the hour or half hour.

  1. In a terminal window on the PPU system, execute the following command:
    /usr/bin/nice --10 /usr/sbin/sar -o /tmp/sarOut 300 12
     
    Where “300” represents the (averaged) interval duration of the utilization sample, in seconds, and “12” represents the number of samples taken. In this example, 12 utilization samples are taken every 5 minutes; therefore, one hour of utilization data is collected. Because the PPU web portal also reports in 5-minute increments, use a 5-minute interval duration with the sar command. You can vary the amount of sar information with its last argument.

  2. After Step 1 has completed, execute the following command:
    /usr/sbin/sar -uM -f /tmp/sarOut > /tmp/sarOut.report
     
    In this step, the binary output from the sar command in Step 1 is converted into a readable (text) format, and captured in the file /tmp/sarOut.report.

  3. Go to the PPU web portal and locate the core utilization reports for the PPU system and the same duration of time used in Step 1. The PPU web portal is located at: http://www.hp.com/go/payperuse

  4. Validate the core utilization numbers from the PPU web portal reports and the core utilization numbers from the sar command, which are located in the file /tmp/sarOut.report.

The PPU web portal report and the information from the sar command differ as follows:

  • The sar command reports the core as the system’s “SPU” number and the PPU web portal report uses the “CPU ID”.

  • For the same 5 minute interval, the sar command’s time stamp is for the end of the interval and the PPU web portal report’s time stamp is for the beginning of the interval. For example, compare the sar utilization numbers for 12:05pm to the PPU web portal report utilization numbers for 12:00pm.

  • To verify core percent utilization numbers, you need to sum the two sar report columns “%usr” and “%sys”, and compare them against the PPU web portal report’s percent utilization.

  • The sar command rounds core percent utilization up to the nearest integer; therefore, individual measurements for the same time period can vary by one percent. Also, since it may be difficult to get the timing of a sar measurement to align exactly with the timing of a PPU measurement, comparisons of specific measurements may also vary due to timing differences, but comparisons of the average utilization over time should match within one percent range.



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