Tag Archives: Services

How to do safe and graceful Measureware service restart in HPUX

A how-to guide for safe and graceful measureware service restart on HPUX machines. Learn how to preserve old log files during service restart and avoid overwriting them.

Measureware service is a native utility to HPUX for performance measurement. It is responsible to collect system utilization data in the background. Measureware agent mwa runs in background and stores data in logfiles called datafiles.  If you attempt measureware service restart without moving logfiles then it will overwrite current files and all historic data is on the toss. Hence you need to stop it then move data files to another location and then start it. In this sequence, you prompt agents to create new blank data files to save data.

You can view the current status of all measureware services using below command :

# mwa status all
 Perf Agent status:
    Running scopeux               (Perf Agent data collector) pid 2814
    Running midaemon              (Measurement Interface daemon) pid 2842
    Running ttd                   (ARM registration daemon) pid 2703

 Perf Agent Server status:

    Running ovcd                  (OV control component) pid 3483
    Running ovbbccb               (BBC5 communication broker) pid 3484
    Running coda                  (perf component) pid(s) 3485
       Configured DataSources(1)
                  SCOPE

    Running perfalarm             (alarm generator) pid(s) 2845

If any of the components are not running or having issues then it may call for measureware service restart. Let’s see the process of the graceful shutdown and the start of measureware services in HPUX.

Read also another performance measurement tool System Activity Report (SAR) in the below series :

1. Stop mwa

Stop all measureware services with single command as below :

# mwa stop all

Shutting down Perf Agent collection software
         Shutting down scopeux, pid(s) 2814
         The Perf Agent collector, scopeux has been shut down successfully.
NOTE:   The ARM registration daemon ttd will be left running.

Shutting down the alarm generator perfalarm, pid(s) 2845
         The perfalarm process has terminated

OVOA is running. Not shutting down coda

As you can see in the above output ttd is left running by command. You need to kill it using below command :

# ttd -k

Also, mideamon still runs after the above command. You can terminate it using :

#  midaemon -T

These three commands collectively shut off everything related to measureware services. You can confirm if midaemon, ttd and scopeux are down with status command again :

#  mwa status all
 Perf Agent status:
WARNING: scopeux    is not active (Perf Agent data collector)
WARNING: midaemon   is not active (Measurement Interface daemon)
WARNING: ttd        is not active (ARM registration daemon)

 Perf Agent Server status:

    Running ovcd                  (OV control component) pid 3483
    Running ovbbccb               (BBC5 communication broker) pid 3484
    Running coda                  (perf component) pid(s) 3485
       Configured DataSources(1)
                  SCOPE

WARNING: perfalarm is not active (alarm generator)

This ensures you can proceed with log movement before starting mwa again.

2. Log movement

Datafiles (all starts with log) resides in /var/opt/perf/datafiles directory. List of datafiles is as below :

# ll /var/opt/perf/datafiles/log*
-rw-r--r--   1 root       users      11064908 Jan  1 03:05 /var/opt/perf/datafiles/logappl
-rw-r--r--   1 root       root       43951620 Jan  1 03:05 /var/opt/perf/datafiles/logdev
-rw-r--r--   1 root       users      9556384 Jan  1 03:05 /var/opt/perf/datafiles/logglob
-rw-r--r--   1 root       root         15716 Jan  1 03:01 /var/opt/perf/datafiles/logindx
-rw-r--r--   1 root       users           15 Nov  4  2009 /var/opt/perf/datafiles/logpcmd0
-rw-r--r--   1 root       root       76492020 Jan  1 03:05 /var/opt/perf/datafiles/logproc
-rw-r--r--   1 root       root       96153856 Jan  1 03:05 /var/opt/perf/datafiles/logtran

Now move current data files to a different directory. You can use below small inline scripts to do this or you can manually move them one by one.

# cd /var/opt/perf/datafiles
# nowis=`date +%d%b%y-%H:%M`
# mkdir /var/opt/perf/datafiles.old.`echo $nowis`
# cp log* /var/opt/perf/datafiles.old.`echo $nowis`

Make sure you copied datafiles to the destination correctly and proceed to start services again.

3. Start mwa

Start it using below command :

#  mwa start all

The Perf Agent scope collector is being started.
         The ARM registration daemon
         /opt/perf/bin/ttd has been started.

         The Performance collection daemon
         /opt/perf/bin/scopeux has been started.

         The coda daemon /opt/OV/lbin/perf/coda is already running.
The Perf Agent alarm generator is being started.
         The alarm generator /opt/perf/bin/perfalarm
         has been started.

Observe while shutting down we used three commands for shutting different components but while starting up it came up with the single command. You can check the status with mwa status all command to make sure all components are started. This pretty much sums up how to do a safe and graceful measureware service restart.

All examples on this post are from the machine running HPUX 11.31. Let us know if you have any queries, suggestions, corrections in comments.