infrageeks
Now this is an interesting little article that just popped up on the Apple Support site :
Mac OS X Server version 10.5: Evaluating performance
Basically it includes a little script called "top-guide.pl" that collects and parses the key performance metrics of CPU, disk I/O, and networking over time and produces a nicely formatted little report of your resource consumption.
What's interesting is that I work in a company that specializes in server virtualization and we use various tools to collect this kind of information in order to properly size a virtualization infrastructure. There are also third party tools that do this kind of collection and subsequent analysis like PlateSpin PowerRecon and VMware Capacity Planner.
This kind of data collection is the standard first step towards being able to ensure that you have correctly assessed the resource requirements for your infrastructure when consolidating multiple servers onto a few. The timing of this release is rather striking with the upcoming versions of VMware Fusion and Parallels Server that will officially support the Apple-sanctioned virtualization of OS X Server. The other clue here is the specificity of the article to OS X Server when in fact the script will run perfectly well on OS X as well.
But why would you be collecting this kind of data if it wasn't with an eye towards consolidation? It's not granular enough for most troubleshooting purposes since you want to know which processes are using up your resources rather than the overall usage profile.
Very interesting...
Update : The script does allow for some process level filtering as well (I hadn't read all the way to the bottom), but also notes the output to file ability and this ability to reuse the data with analysis tools.
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