Windows Xp Disk Space Analyzer
Using Sas to Analyze System Performance Metrics
Using SAS to Analyze System Performance Metrics
This project involved using Microsoft Management Console 2.0 (Perfmon) to generate flat files containing system metrics, including memory, disk space, and percent CPU utilization, which were then used in SAS to build data sets in order to analyze the performance data. SAS functions including SAS proc SQL, proc means, proc freq, and proc ttest and proc reg were utilized. Graphing of the data was performed, both using proc chart and by generating XML that was displayed on the web using XML/SWF Charts Flash technology.
Perfmon was used to pull data files, collecting data at 5 second intervals for 30 minutes. Four such files were pulled, one with the system idle, one with McAfee virus scan software running, one with Dragon voice recognition software running, and one with Netflix software playing a movie. The system used for the testing was a Pentium 4, 2.39 GHz processor, with 768 MB RAM, running Windows XP SP2, with a 37.2 GB hard drive.
Perfmon is launched by opening a command window and entering perfmon on the command line. The console root of the performance monitoring tool has two tabs, one is the system monitor and one for performance logs and alerts. Under performance logs and alerts counter logs was highlighted, then by right-clicking on it a new log settings was selected, then under Properties | General the counters were selected.
A Unix version of SAS as well as the SAS learning edition Windows version was used for the analysis. While SAS was chosen for this project, other statistical packages could have been used as well. Microsoft Excel configured with its statistical analysis add-in for regression analysis can perform all of the analysis required for this project. Excel however requires more manual steps to enter data and prepare it for analysis – to input the data into various spreadsheet worksheets and to apply the necessary functions. With SAS once the code is written, it can quickly be applied to additional data sets.
Another option would be to use JMP, another statistics package from the SAS Corporation with a graphical user interface used to apply statistical functions. Its interface is somewhat like Excel in that the data would be entered into worksheets and functions selected from drop-down menus. One limitation of these two alternative applications involves very large data sets with hundreds of thousands or millions of rows of data. SAS can handle such large data sets but Excel and JMP cannot.
The first task in terms SAS programming was to read the data into a data set. Because the Perfmon data was in tab delimited format in a text file it was possible to simply go to the file menu and use the import option on the file menu of SAS and follow the wizard to import the data and create a new data set, after first using FTP to transfer the .txt files from Windows to Unix.
Another task is to use the SAS proc means function in order to generate summary statistics for disk space, CPU utilization, and memory utilization. The summary statistics include minimum and maximum values, standard deviation, and mean values. The following code was used to perform this task. [The code and the remainder of this article are availabe here: http://members.cox.net/chelwig1/hello.html
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