MXG against NMON to process AIX performance data

In my last www.CMG.org paper "AIX frame and LPAR level Capacity Planning. User Case for Online Banking Application" I have demonstrated how to analyze AIX server based application performance by exceptions (including IT-Control charting).  

But what type of server performance data I used for that? NMON data. And how to process that data? I would recommenced to use SAS and MXG -  that is the way,  if you are lucky to have access to SAS and MXG tools ...

Below are a few hints for readers who want to try to set up MXG to process NMON data.

How to set up and run MXG against AIX nmon data is documented in the following useful ppt document http://mxg.com/downloads/chuck/mxgtoolmagic.ppt that has ASCII installation and tailoring instructions starting from page 16.

-        There is also install.sas document inside of MXM package .../mxg/sourclib that has the following instructions regarding ascii installation:

"****************************************************************

    For ASCII Execution:

    Instead of JCL Procs, it is the AUTOEXEC.SAS file that conrols and

    sets up the MXG environment.  You will need to copy and EDIT the MXG

    example autoexec for the directory names, etc., for your platform

       AUTOEXEC  -   SAS - Windows

       AUTOEXEU  -   SAS - Unix

       AUTOEXEW  -   WPS - All ASCII

    into the your SAS root directory, if all users are MXG users, or you

    can add the -autoexec option to the start-up icon, or in batch, use

      sas -autoexec 'c:\mxg\userid\autoexec.sas' ...

************************************************************************"

When the MXG environment is set up properly, to run MXG against NMON data and creating PDBs with nmon data one needs to do just following steps:

-    - Submit FILENAME NMONIN  "*.nmon";  * to provide the path to raw nmon log file;

-    - Submit TYPENMON macro:

%INCLUDE SOURCLIB(VMACNMON,IMACKEEP);

DATA

_VARNMON

_CDENMON

_SNMON

To prove/test that I have:

 

-         -  copied MXG folder (could be downloaded from MXG) to my laptop folder to C:\MXG\sourclib;

-          - created a few new folders like C:\MXG\PDB  (see p. 17 ) ;

-          - modified a bit and submitted  the autoexec.sas (I have added there the nmon log to process - “FILENAME NMONIN   "C:\MXG\DATA\aprcmix1_131212_0000.nmon" LRECL=32000;”

-         -  submitted  C:\MXG\sourclib\formats macro to rebuild formats library ;

-          - submitted the main macro C:\MXG\sourclib\typenmon  to process “C:\MXG\DATA\prix1.nmon” and build PDB with nmon SAS datasets in C:\MXG\PDB ;

-          - checked the resulted PDBs in C:\MXG\PDB. 

Last thing is to use SAS /IML with R to build control charts (HERE hints how to do that) or if you have SAS/Graph - HERE is how to use that.

Good luck! And put you questions to comments!