Overview
Live Optics Optical Prime collector software will begin recording a list of top processes running on the servers that it monitors. This will provide users insight into the application workload on a given server. A running process is an application or service running on the server. Optical Prime will record usage statistics for the running process. This usage will include CPU time, disk IO, hard page faults, and private (non-shared) memory usage.
Optical Prime will only collect and list the top running process on Windows and Linux based operating systems. For other OS (Solaris, HP-UX, and ESXi), this information will not be collected, nor will it display any information within this list.
The following steps detail how to access the top application processes output collected for each applicable device during the Optical Prime collector run.
Prerequisite Information
- The project has already been created from one or more Optical Prime collector runs
- Access to a Live Optics account should already be complete before beginning the following steps. Access the Live Optics portal https://www.liveoptics.com and login with your account credentials. If you have never logged into Live Optics before, go to https://app.liveoptics.com/signup and request your account be created or contact your Dell Sales Team and request they register you to the Live Optics portal.
Access Performance View of project
- Locate the project on the Live Optics Portal and click on the name at the top to view.
- Once the Optical Prime project opens, click on the Performance View tab.
Select server in device list
- The Top Processes list is only for an individual device in a Live Optics project for Optical Prime and cannot be viewed from when looking at the aggregate information. Select a server from the device list.
Select Top Processes button
- To view the list of top processes on a server, click "Top Processes".
- By default, the top processes are listed by those using the largest amount of CPU time.
- There are three other sorting criteria that can be used to list top processes.
- They are disk read time (Reads), disk write time (Writes), and memory usage (Memory).
- Anytime a new sorting button is selected, the data will automatically change and display a new list of processes.
- If at any time you want to view the top processes on another server in a Live Optics project, select a new server from the Device List and a new list of processes will be generated.
Additional Notes
When Live optics is collecting application process data, it is looking at the following information:
- Process Name: Often times, this will be listed as the EXE file running for a process. In the case of a Windows Service, this name will include an appended list of service names that share the process shell.
- CPU Percentage since last boot
- Disk Reads
- Disk Writes
- Hard Page Faults
- Memory Usage: This does not include any shared memory usage between application
The discovery of application information occurs during the initial Optical Prime discovery phase, prior to the start of the performance collection. Any processes starting after Optical Prime discovery could be missed during the analysis of top running processes.