Athene Acquires exist for a number of operating systems, including Unix, Linux, Windows, VMware, zOS, and OpenVMS.  Acquires are also available for RDBMS environments
(SQL Server and Oracle) as well as Windows Applications (IIS and Exchange).

There are a few key requirements for an agent-based capture mechanism:

High capture ratio (high quality data)
Captured data is only useful if the data is of high quality and accurately reflects the activity of the workloads on the systems.  Athene’s Acquires capture the required performance data from systems at the granularity and during the time periods that the user chooses.

Low system overhead
A capacity management product that causes performance and/or capacity issues would not be very practical (and would be hard to justify!).  The capture methods chosen for Athene’s Acquires were not picked simply because they capture all the relevant data at the right granularity – they were chosen in order to minimize the usage of precious system resources, like memory, CPU, and disk space.

Low footprint
Typically, agents are installed on partitions of systems that are allocated fairly small amounts of disk by system administrators.  Athene’s Acquires are designed to not only consume a minimum amount of disk space when installed, but also consume a minimal amount of disk when capturing and storing data.  Housekeeping routines are built into the Acquires in order to mark data as transferred to the central Athene server and then delete the data on a completely configurable schedule.  This allows system administrators to feel secure in the knowledge that the capacity management solution will not cause a capacity problem!

Autonomous capture and collection processes (no reliance on a continual connection to a central console)
Athene’s Acquires work autonomously – that means that the capture mechanism will continue even if the central Athene server or the Athene database is unavailable.  Data is stored locally for a time and is transferred on a regular schedule (or when the connection to the Athene server is once again available).  Housekeeping routines ensure that local disks do not fill to capacity, so with Athene you get both the confidence in knowing that data is always capturing and that transfer of that data will take place even if the connection between the Athene server and the target is broken for a time.

Easy and secure transfer of data to a central capacity (Athene) database
Data is crucial for a capacity manager, so the transfer of that data from the targets to the Athene database must be automatic, easy, and secure.  Athene is designed and tested to work with standard file transfer mechanisms, including file/directory sharing, FTP, SFTP, and FTPS.  The choice is yours.

Covers a heterogeneous environment, covering all the key platforms of the business
Most businesses rely on a variety of platforms to run their businesses.  A capacity management solution must be able to handle all those platforms with ease and allow the capacity manager to use a single interface to create reports, perform vital analyses, and predict the future based on business forecasts and planned hardware changes.  Athene provides the capability to create multi-platform reports, which is crucial with today’s n-tier and cloud-based applications.  Most importantly, a capacity manager is able to focus on one tool and one interface when performing the key tasks of the role, no matter how many platforms are involved.

athene® Acquires

Unix/Linux Acquires capture data using native Unix/Linux utilities (like sar, vmstat, iostat, df, etc.), process accounting, and (where applicable) extended accounting.  These utilities are designed to consume a very small amount of system resources and the Acquire’s job is to store the data in a format that can be securely retrieved and inserted into the athene® database.

Windows Acquires capture data (including IIS, Exchange, and SQL Server) from the Windows Performance Counters – the same data that is accessed when running the Windows perfmon utility.  Unlike perfmon, athene® takes this captured data and stores it at a desired granularity and in a format that can be securely retrieved and inserted into the athene® database.

z/OS data is readily available from mature and rich sources such as IBM’s RMF or BMC’s CMF, and other SMF data.  The athene® z/OS Acquire takes the most relevant subset of this voluminous data, including CICS, DB2, Job Detail, Coupling Facility, Channel Path, DASD, and many other types of data. It extracts details about the systems where it was run, about the activity in all logical partitions on the physical machine, from Workload Manager’s Service Classes and Report Classes, and includes capture of activity by specialty processors.  This greatly reduced volume of data can then be easily and securely transferred and stored in the central athene® database.
Athene’s VMS Acquire captures performance data using VMS’s MONITOR as well as other VMS routines.  Captured data includes CPU performance data, disk performance data, process statistics, storage statistics, memory allocations, as well as other system data.  The data can then be easily and securely transferred and stored in the central athene® database.