I was just looking at the observability community page, at http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/observability/ and it set off a few thoughts about that page, some of the tools, and some things that may be missing.
I actually much prefer top to prstat. Comparing the two, prstat is missing a few things that I use all the time in top - the CPU states, the memory/swap statistics, and the last pid. Furthermore, you can change the sort order and filter by user on the fly. And generally, I just find top easier to read. The page describes prtconf as x86 only. Strange! It works on all my sparc machines... Alongside prtconf and prtdiag, I think mention should be made of prtfru and prtpicl. I wrote a java kstat browser, and I'm tempted to do the same for prtpicl (and maybe some of the other prt* commands), to make it easier to see the hierarchy and drill down into it. It's hard to wade through prtconf and prtpicl output (especially with -v on). I see no mention of busstat. (Of particular use might be a mention of the sort of questions it might provide answers to.) One area conspicuous by its absence on the page is network observability. And some of the tools we used to have no longer work (or work properly). For example, nfswatch used to be a very useful tool, and no longer works as it hasn't been updated. Another tool we used to use extensively to view network traffic was etherman. There's obviously the use of netstat and nfsstat. One thing I would like to see much more of is graphical display of what's going on. You can have all the numbers in the world, but good graphical visualization tools can make it so obvious what's going on! -Peter Tribble MRC Rosalind Franklin Centre for Genomics Research http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
