HP Capacity Advisor 7.2 User Guide

Table 2 A comparison of agentless data collection and use of Utilization WBEM Provider
Utilization ProviderAgentless data collection
Equally useful in data quality and accuracy.
Available for HP-UX and OpenVMS systemsAvailable for Microsoft Windows, Linux, and non-HP
systems
Provides the basic set of resource utilization metrics for
CPU, memory, network I/O, and disk I/O.
Provides the basic set of utilization metrics for CPU,
memory, network I/O, and disk I/O, plus additional
metrics for reporting specific activities in the operating
system, disk, and network: CPU queue length, page
faults/second, disk I/Os per second, LAN packets/second,
number of disks, disk space total, disk space used.
Requires hosting and updating the Utilization Provider
agent
Leverages existing data on the system; no additional agent
hosting or update required
Not susceptible to downtime in the network or the CMS.
Collected data is held for a maximum of 30 days by the
Utilization Provider for transfer to the database on the CMS
Susceptible to network or CMS downtime as data is
continuously collected by the CMS across the network from
each managed system
Slight additional load on CMS CPU or memory resources
incurred by the ongoing operation of the UP.
Small additional load on the CMS CPU and memory
resources incurred by the ongoing operation of the
agentless data collection service
Slight additional load on managed system resources, due
to local queries from the Utilization Provider agent every
five minutes, and storage/retrieval of historical metrics on
the local file system
Slight additional load on managed system resources due
to remote queries from the collector every five minutes
Slight additional load on network.Small additional load on the network incurred by the
ongoing operation of the agentless data collection service
Data collection starts within 24 hours of configuring
licensing for the system using Insight managed system setup
wizard. However, if the Utilization Provider is already
running on the managed system, data collection may start
within a few minutes of licensing the system, and the data
collected may cover an interval as long as 30 days
previous to configuration in Matrix OE.
Data collection starts within a few minutes of configuring
licensing for system using Insight managed system setup
wizard.
HP ICperf data differs from Utilization Provider data
Differences in data imported from HP Insight Control performance management (ICperf) affect how
you should interpret resulting analysis and scenarios as compared to data collected from the
Utilization Provider.
Differences in memory data
Capacity Advisor normally measures memory collected from the Utilization Provider, which returns
the sum of memory allocated to the processes on the system.
ICperf collection provides the total memory less the zeroed, free, and standby memory.
This means that ICperf counts memory used by the operating system, whereas the Utilization
Provider does not. The memory use reported by ICperf is about 20% higher than memory use
reported by the Utilization Provider.
Because Capacity Advisor assumes a different memory amount than ICperf provides, Capacity
Advisor may overestimate the memory needed when using ICperf data to analyze stacking several
application instances in a system running a single instance of an operating system.
While either the Utilization Provider data or the ICperf data can be used to plan memory size in
a new configuration, you should not use a mix of ICperf and Utilization Provider data when looking
for a trend in memory utilization.
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