Compaq ProLiant 1000 Compaq Survey Utility - Page 4

ECG075/0798 WHITE PAPER (cont.) ... WHAT IS COMPAQ SURVEY UTILITY? Compaq Survey Utility is an online information-gathering agent similar to other Compaq management agents that run on servers. It gathers critical hardware and software information from various sources to give a complete view of the server. Survey Utility delivers comprehensive configuration capture, provides a means for automatically identifying and comparing configuration changes, and automatically maintains a server configuration history. The information is saved as a history of multiple sessions in a single configuration history file that can be downloaded to the user's system. This utility was developed to allow resolution of problems without taking the server offline and to assist in maximizing server availability. The information obtained by the utility is useful in troubleshooting server problems, and streamlines the service process by enabling quick and easy identification of server configurations, which is the first step in resolving service cases. Compaq Survey Utility version 2.04 and later includes a web browser interface in addition to the command-line interface to allowing access using a familiar user interface. This also enables remote control of the utility and facilitates easy transfer of survey information from remote machines to a service provider. Theory of Operation The Compaq Survey Utility captures data as sessions; a session is defined as an organized group of data describing the configured state of the system at a specific point in time. The Compaq Survey Utility maintains up to 10 distinct sessions. The session information is maintained in a file called SURVEY.IDI, located in the same directory as the executable portion of the program. This file contains all of the binary information captured for every session. This file can be analyzed locally by the Survey 4