HP StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services Platform Administrator Guide (5697-0934, May 2011)

Using Perfmon counters to log
Perfmon has many counters available, but your data becomes harder to monitor if you have to sort
through too much. To learn about a counter, select it, and then click the Explain button.
Choose the category from the Performance object drop-down menu. Some counters with similar
purposes (for example, Processor: %, Processor Time, and System: Processor Queue Length) are
in different categories.
Remember to select Total when the option is available, unless you are interested in the % Disk Time
for an individual LUN (or similar situations). There may not be a Total available even with multiple
items listed. In this case you can select the All instances radio button. Once you have your Perfmon
data, you can analyze it with a Perl script tool or Microsoft Excel.
You cannot measure the data mover performance for specific jobs. However, you can learn about
the data mover performance by measuring the total throughput of VSM against storage arrays or
the VSM throughput against a particular array. To view that information, you select the counters
for "SaActive Driver Total Performance" or "SaActive Driver Raid Performance." SaActive is the
multipath driver that the VSM uses for working with different storage arrays. As such, all the IOs
to the storage array pass through this driver. The data consists of the access to the setup volume
(small writes/reads) and data mover activity that's executed with 1 MB reads/writes. So the total
read and write throughput indicates VSM data mover activity.
Troubleshooting Perfmon
Table 5 (page 52) describes potential Perfmon problems and possible corrective actions.
Monitoring system performance 51