[Dev] TestMaker 5 System Monitor Options

[William Martinez Pomares]

Hello all.

TestMaker has a system resources monitor function, that allows the
recording of three types of system information: The CPU utilization %,
the Memory usage % and the network bandwith usage %.

As you know, all platforms have different ways to obtain that
information. The actual monitor was done for Windows systems, and it
uses the Windows PDH interfaces to access the internal counters (the
same ones used in the perfmon windows utility). The next step was to
create native monitors for each platform type (linux and MacOS).

There is a suggestion to use SNMP instead, given that protocol is a
standardized way to control and access system information. SNMP is a
great approach, but also suffers from some drawbacks.
1. First, the data is obtained by executing get commands using OIDs. The
OIDs are actually different for each platform, so we either have to
gather all OIDs related to the platform, or ask the user to load
platform dependent MIBs and to select the correspoding OIDs.
2. There is data, like the CPU usage %, that is not reported in a
similar way to the actual monitor. For instance, the actual monitor in
PDH returns the actual CPU usage %, while SNMP returns hrProcessorLoad:
"The average, over the last minute, of the percentage of time that this
processor was not idle". With the actual approach, system performance
data can be recorded each 10 seconds if needed, with the hrProcessorLoad
OID, it can be registered each minute. It may not be a major issue, it
depends on how often you may want to gather that info.

Any comments, suggestions? Do you think SNMP is a good idea?

William.