March 19, 2005
Analyze Siebel SARM data with Perl
Had a chance to play around with Siebel SARM a little bit. The first thing you have to do is enable the SARM components, by setting the SARMEnabled, SARMMaxMemory, and SARMMaxFileSize on the Siebel appserver. Information about the whole process can be found in Siebel Tech Note 472. Once .sarm files are produced, the next step is to run the SARMAnalyzer on the .sarm files produced under the appserver, which gives you a performance report by component, in XML. I wrote some perl to analyize SARM XML, and sort and order the components. This was done following the advice in the "Performance Area Aggregation Analysis" section of Tech Note 472. Here is a example of the SARM analysis output.
Siebel SARM is currently billed as a development and testing tool. Measuring and baselining SARM data in production environments would be an excellent tool for monitoring Siebel. However, the current recommendation is to use this as development tool, and not have SARM enabled in production, because SARM itself takes resources. How much resources? Needs more anlyisis. It could be worth the tradeoff, hard to say. At anyrate, application systems that self publish their performance data (and I would argue availiblity information, wich is not part of SARM) is a trend that is sorely need in the enterprise software industry.