MySQL PHP Generating reports in PDF format

In continuation to my previous blog on charting epoch time series MySQL data using PHP. I started exploring generating better reports from the DB.

Inspired by the EMC SRM (M&R)  storage capacity reports in PDF format, I thought of doing similar kind of reports “in-house” which should be simple yet standard to be shared with customers. I would like to thank Sapan Kumar from EMC who thought me so many things about EMC’s SRM (M&R) custom reporting features.

We have the data in  MySQL DB and wanted to use the PDF module in PHP to generate reports. But which module is suitable and easy to use?

After rigorous testing with FPDF and DOMPDF, I decided to use FPDF (not sure why :p) and it produced nice reports indeed!

Please find sample reports screenshot produced below for reference. You could see the capacity reports of VNX and VMAX storage arrays.

If interested, please reach out to me to get the PHP code. Thanks for stopping by… Please leave your comments / suggestions.

Advertisement

Manage services from CLI on Linux

In Window$ OS, we can check running services and its status by going to Services console. (Start > Run > services.exe)

Similarly, to access running services info and status under Linux via BASH / Shell, we need to install ‘sysv-rc-conf’

aptitude install sysv-rc-conf

Below screenshot show the output of sysv-rc-conf command displaying status of service for all running levels (1-6) and startup (S)

As you can see in the screenshot to start a service use ‘+’ and to stop a service use ‘-‘. To enable or disable service to run at startup goto the respective service’s ‘S’ column and then use ‘Space Bar’.

MYSQL PHP Charting epoch Time series data

I was writing PHP code to generate EMC VMAX performance reports / charts stored in MySQL DB. As we know that Unisphere REST API output performance metrics in epoch (13 digits) format (milliseconds). As an example, to draw a line chart for Frontend Director’s Read Response Time with X axis / Abscissa as epoch time. I’ve used below query to generate the datapoints to draw the chart using pChart

SELECT TIME(FROM_UNIXTIME(timstamp/1000)) as TIME, ROUND(AVG(perfval),2) as wrt FROM vmax_perf

where DAYOFMONTH(FROM_UNIXTIME(timstamp/1000)) = DAYOFMONTH(DATE_SUB(curdate(), INTERVAL 1 DAY))

and objname =’fe’ and perfparam =’ReadResponseTime’

group by HOUR(FROM_UNIXTIME(timstamp/1000))

Let me explain the above statement

TIME(FROM_UNIXTIME(timstamp/1000)) :: Extract Time from the epoch (13 digit) format in millisecond

ROUND(AVG(perfval),2) :: Average of Read Response Time per Hour rounded output to 2 digits after decimal point

DAYOFMONTH(FROM_UNIXTIME(timstamp/1000)) = DAYOFMONTH(DATE_SUB(curdate(), INTERVAL 1 DAY)) :: Extract day (ex. ’12’ from 12th Nov 2016 where current date is 13th Nov 2016) and display the data points

group by HOUR(FROM_UNIXTIME(timstamp/1000)) :: Print the datapoints for every hour

If interested, please reach out to me to get the PHP code.

Stay Tuned for more updates on MySQL queries to generate charts for Daily, Weekly, Monthly and Quarterly performance reports / charts. Thanks for stopping by… Please leave your comments / suggestions.

Thanks for stopping by… Please leave your comments / suggestions.

GNU/Parallel – Run multiple commands simultaneously

GNU/Parallel is an open source tiny executable yet so powerful to run / start multiple commands at the same time. This is a handy tool when we are trying to run multiple scripts to maintain consistency of timestamp across the board.

Below is a simple file named as REST to execute Python RESTAPI scripts simultaneously

date > start.$today.array;python sym_perf_stats_v4.py &>> /vin/array.$today.log; date > end.$today.array
date > start.$today.fe;python fe_perf_stats_v3.py &>> /vin/fe.$today.log; date > end.$today.fe
date > start.$today.be; python be_perf_stats_v3.py &>> /vin/be.$today.log; date > end.$today.be
date > start.$today.diskgrp ; python dg_perf_stats_v3.py &>> /vin/diskgrp.$today.log; date > end.$today.diskgrp
date > start.$today.tp ; python tp_perf_stats_v3.py &>> /vin/tp.$today.log; date > end.$today.tp

to run the above scripts in parallel we need to execute the below command

#parallel -j 5 <REST

-j switch used to run ‘n’ number of commands in parallel from the same console

***UPDATE *** As per suggestion from oletange. Above file ‘REST’ can be better written as below

parallel ‘date > start.$today.{};python {}_perf_stats_v3.py &>> /vin/{}.$today.log; date > end.$today.{}’ ::: sym fe be dg tp

To install GNU/Parallel on Debian / Debian based OS

#apt-get install parallel

 

EMC VMAX Storage Automated Performance Report

This blog is being written as a companion to my previous blog on Automated EMC VMAX Capacity Reporting

In recent times, we’re asked to develop scripts to capture performance metrics from EMC VMAX storage. There is a ‘symstat’ command with many attributes to capture performance metrics information from the array. But this command was not fulfilling all our requirements. While exploring various options and consultation with EMC support / community we decided to try Unisphere / RESTAPI.

So far I was using Perl as THE LANGUAGE to talk to my storage arrays. But I was forced to switch over to Python which works best with REST API / JSON. Additionally, there are lots of code out there on RESTAPI written in Python. So it is easy to ‘get inspired’ by those codes and write customized code for our requirements. So this would make me yet another ‘Pythonistas’ 🙂

This is my first ever Python (version 2.7 on GNU/Debian Linux) script to capture EMC VMAX Performance Metrics retrieved from Unisphere for VMAX (version 8.2) via RESTAPI. I’ve referred this Python script to develop custom script to suit our requirements. Many thanks to Matt Cowger (mcowger) for sharing the script in Github.

There are plenty of metrics that can be captured using this script but I’ve written a simple code for demo purpose to print few metrics in CSV format which can be either imbibed by excel for further reporting / charting or injected to MySQL DB to do many stuffs…

Here is the sample + cropped output for reference. In the below table timestamp (column B) is in epoch format which is converted to MYSQL datetime format via INSERT query

 

P.S: I’ve changed VMAX serial number for various factors

If interested, please reach out to me to get these Python scripts.

Image Courtesy: https://www.emc.com

References: https://github.com/mcowger/randompython/blob/master/symmREST.py

Thanks for stopping by… Please leave your comments / suggestions.