I’m working on a new open source project that should be finalized, documented, and available shortly. What I want to know is: what sort of system analysis do you want to perform on your OS X box? There’s the standard quota stuff, and obvious sysadmin tasks like logfile watching, etc., but what else? How about what users have used what programs based on Preference files? Go nuts with your suggestions and desires - you may see them become reality.
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Which App Bandwidth?
Some things on my machine that could really use monitering:
*bandwidth usage by application
*systemwide power consumption(No clue how you'd do
that)
sinewave
VM usage
I'd like to see a tool that would clearly tell me if my patterns of usage would require adding more RAM to reduce the hit to the hard drive. I'd be happy if I got a score based on a percentage (ie: there is a 10% chance that adding "x" Mb's of RAM would increase your perceived speed by a factor of "y") since I know that usage can vary wildly.
Working standard performance analysis tools...
E.g., iostat, vmstat, netstat, sar, etc.... Moreover, they should support all the advanced flags, such as "iostat -xncP" for Solaris.
I'd like to be able to take existing books on doing Unix performance tuning and be able to directly apply them to MacOS X, without having to wonder how Apple horked up and made a useless vm_stat program, or whether I can get the disk %busy and %wait times and average service/wait times out of the standard tools, etc....
It'd be nice to automatically tie these kinds of tools into something like rrdtool+orca for the local machine, so that I can get loads of historical data as to what the load averages were and when, how much memory was in use and in what manner, how much network I/O was performed, basically all the various different things that you can measure through Net-SNMP, and if there are any standard performance metrics you can't measure through Net-SNMP then you'd need to have a custom agent to handle those.
Oh, and don't forget about all the stuff that lire can do (from logreport.org). I'd like this turned on by default for all the various areas it covers.
Tuning for desktop use
Since most OS X Macs will be used as dekstop machines instead of servers as their *nix cousins, any tools or flags to utils like vmstat relevent to the desktop will be appreciated.
Many graphic designers and related creative types really hit the graphic system hard, so finding ways to tune this part of OS X would be really great.
Joe
Intrusion Detection
Be nice to know who's hitting my server and what they're doing. It would also be nice to automagically block ip addresses trying to break in.