System Garden

Habitat 1.0 User Manual

Contents

  1. A Tour of Habitat
  2. Getting Started
  3. Concepts
  4. Clockwork: The Collection Agent
  5. Graphical Tools
  6. Text Terminal Tools
  7. Command Line Tools
  8. System Performance
  9. Events
  10. Administration
  11. Diagnostics
  12. Appendix

Getting Started

Habitat comes in two parts: the collection agent (called clockwork) and the viewing client (called ghabitat, but others are available). It can be started in many ways and these are described in full later in this document and in detail in the Administration manual. However, to get started, we shall describe two common ways in which habitat can be run.

Collection by User

If you install from the tar file, with no automatic starting of the collection daemon, the graphical tool will start it for you. This is the simplest way to start using habitat under Solaris. Firstly, extract the package from the tar file, then cd into the bin directory and run ghabitat at the command line. Below is an example of installation and running:

tar xvzf habitat-1.0.0-mdk1.i586.rpm
cd habitat-1.0.0/bin
ghabitat

Once started, ghabitat will look for a central instance of clockwork (the collection agent) that may already be running. If it does (from a previous run perhaps), then it attempts to load a default set of data from it. If it cannot find clockwork then it will ask the user if you want to start one. The options are described later in this document, but for now, click on start.

System Collection

This is the simplest of all and is the default way in which an RPM package is installed. When rpm -i is issued, habitat loads itself into the correct system location for a Linux system and automatically starts clockwork the collection agent. The initialisation scripts are also amended to start collection each time the system is booted.

When ghabitat is started from the system location (like /usr/bin/ghabitat), it will work out that collection is already running and attempt to get the initial data from it.

Initial ghabitat view

Once started, the graphical client ghabitat, presents the user with an explorer-like interface, with data choices on the left and visualisation on the right. In addition to this, the charting displays also have a curve selection list on the extreme right plus some zoom and scaling buttons.




Now we have the viewing platform running, allow clockwork to collect some data for a few minutes from the system and read more about the way habitat works.