Mandalika's scratchpad: Solaris 11.4: Brief Introduction to Solaris Analytics

This is something I can take some credit for even though I haven't contributed in any significant way other than filing a timely enhancement request. :-)

Overview

On a high level: Solaris has quite a few observability and diagnostic tools and utilities such as vmstat, mprstat, iostat, prstat, pgstat, lockstat, dtrace to observe and diagnose CPU/Core/memory/disk IO/network utilization, locks, busy processes and threads, interrupts and so on. However except for power users, majority of normal users and application & system administrators are not much familiar with those tools, or savvy enough to read man pages and documentation to figure the best ways to extract diagnostic or performance data/information that they want or need (this is likely the case across all operating environments not just Solaris).

Solaris 11.4 attempts to improve the usability of these tools and utilities by providing an interactive browser user interface (BUI) called "Oracle Solaris Analytics". Solaris Analytics gather event information and data samples from a variety of system & application sources. Consolidated view of the statistics, faults and administrative change requests are presented in a simple easy-to-digest manner. Users will be guided through health and performance analysis to diagnose problems.

Ultimately OS users, application and system administrators benefit with the visual representation of performance and diagnostic data, and system events. For instance, with the help of Solaris Analytics users will be able to view historical information about system performance, contrast it with current performance, and correlate statistics and events from multiple sources.

Check Using Oracle Solaris 11.4 Analytics for more information and details.

Accessing the Analytics BUI

Analytics services are enabled by default, and the Solaris Web UI can be accessed on ports 443 and 6787.

Access Analytics BUI at https://<s11.4host>:<port>/solaris/ where "s11.4host" is the hostname of the system running Solaris 11.4 and port=[443|6787].

Those who are familiar with the Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance BUI may find some similarities between these two browser interfaces.

Troubleshooting: Unable to access Analytics BUI?

Make sure that:

webui-server package was installed on target host
```
pkg list webui-server
```
svc:/system/webui/server:default and svc:/system/sstore:default services are online
```
svcs webui/server sstore
```

Screenshots

Note that the system is almost idle to show any interesting data. Click on each image to see the image in original size.

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