netstat command

Nitin Jain — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:40:12 +0000

Hi all,

All of us have faced huge performance related issues. When it comes to Siebel, things can only be called murky! The OOB solution itself puts up a few questions. I say this as per my naive understanding and experience

Sorry for being away from this blog for so long. It’s just that almost all the writers on the panel have really been too occupied with their regular jobs.

Anyways, getting the Siebel server performance out of the way, the next thing that comes to anybody’s mind is to check the performance of the physical Server Box itself. I mean the Server Operating System and the processes that it is running. This is where we can make use of the netstat utility.

netstat, or the Network Statistics as we may call it, is a simple command line utility. When used with proper parameters on the command line, it can be used to monitor:
1) Incoming Network Connections
2) Outgoing Network Connections
3) Network Interface Statistics
4) Some Network Routing information that I could see.

It is available on most of the common Operating Systems like Windows, UNIX, etc.

It is generally used to find Network Problems, and more so to find the Network Usage by the number of open Network Connections, for Performance related measurements. A typical netstat output could look like:

Active Connections

Proto Local Address          Foreign Address        State
TCP    :1218      :8080 CLOSE_WAIT
TCP    :2841     :1400 ESTABLISHED
TCP    :4651      localhost:62514        ESTABLISHED
TCP    :5152      localhost:3863         CLOSE_WAIT
TCP    :62514     localhost:4651         ESTABLISHED

etc..

A simple dos help utility look up revealed the following options to this utility on my Win XP based machine:

Displays protocol statistics and current TCP/IP network connections.

NETSTAT [-a] [-b] [-e] [-n] [-o] [-p proto] [-r] [-s] [-v] [interval]

-a            Displays all connections and listening ports.
-b            Displays the executable involved in creating each connection or
                listening port. In some cases well-known executables host
                multiple independent components, and in these cases the
                sequence of components involved in creating the connection
                or listening port is displayed. In this case the executable
                name is in [] at the bottom, on top is the component it called,
                and so forth until TCP/IP was reached. Note that this option
                can be time-consuming and will fail unless you have sufficient
                permissions.
-e            Displays Ethernet statistics. This may be combined with the -s
                option.
-n            Displays addresses and port numbers in numerical form.
-o            Displays the owning process ID associated with each connection.
-p proto      Shows connections for the protocol specified by proto; proto
                may be any of: TCP, UDP, TCPv6, or UDPv6. If used with the -s
                option to display per-protocol statistics, proto may be any of:
                IP, IPv6, ICMP, ICMPv6, TCP, TCPv6, UDP, or UDPv6.
-r            Displays the routing table.
-s            Displays per-protocol statistics. By default, statistics are
                shown for IP, IPv6, ICMP, ICMPv6, TCP, TCPv6, UDP, and UDPv6;
                the -p option may be used to specify a subset of the default.
-v            When used in conjunction with -b, will display sequence of
                components involved in creating the connection or listening
                port for all executables.
interval      Redisplays selected statistics, pausing interval seconds
                between each display. Press CTRL+C to stop redisplaying
                statistics. If omitted, netstat will print the current
                configuration information once.

Usage Example:

netstat -aon

This utility can be of immense use on analysing server performances where we are quite sure that the server is running slower than nowmal. It could possibly be running some junk tasks from the now defunct softwares that we no longer need.
Try it, and tell me what you see on your PC!

Related posts:

Siebel Admin – Gateway Name Server – An overview We discussed about the basic Siebel Server Architecture in our...

Siebel Server Architecture – an Introduction You may call this an introductory tutorial. Siebel as we...

Siebel Tools hangs when checking out objects Hi, Now this is strange. I had been running into...

Siebel Server Verification – EVT Tool Verifying the health of our Siebel Server Environment is the...

Siebel – Automatic User Logout Logging out a user automatically, when the user does not...

XPath Expressions in XML – Part I

Nitin Jain — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 05:28:21 +0000

This post has a broad focus, not just Siebel CRM. I have briefly alluded to the XML structures in EAI in some of my previous posts:
A meeting with Siebel EAI
FINS Industry XML Query Service

One of the interesting things that came out of the feedback was parsing the XML and the XPath expressions. This is exactly what I will be covering in my blog post today.

The XPath defines the path, or the way that you parse/read/traverse through an XML. The concept is generic in nature. However, Siebel in itself has some limitations in the way that it handles these expressions. I will try to cover both these scenarios here. I will take the following small XML Snippet as an example for better understanding of the same. One of the best ways to understanding this is to refer this structure of the XML is a popular XML Editor like Internet Explorer, Oxygen Editor, Editplus, Altova XML Spy (I like this the best), or any other supported browser.

    burger
    10
    1000


    pepsi
    5

Following is the terminology that I will be using:
roottag:                                snackbar
childtag:                               fastfood
grandchildtag:                  name, price
attribute:                             id (this is the attribute of the grandchild element in the XML)

The line on the top () defines that the structure is of an XML, and helps the browser parse it. One of the best ways to validate a valid XML is to try and open it in a web browser like Internet Explorer. In case of any discrepancies, the document will throw an error and will not open in the Browser.

Following are some of the common XPath expressions:
/     forward slash – used to differentiate between parent and child tags one level deep
//    two forward slashes – indicate searches anywhere in the XML, typically more than one level deep
./    indicates the currect XML document passed an input.
.//   indicates the need to search multiple levels deep in the document
@     indicates the attribute to a particular tag
*     wildcard character to match any tag/element in the XML

Using the above table, if for eg. I need to retrieve the value in the name tag for burger object, I would build the expression as:
./snackbar/fastfood/name

Similarly, for getting the price of ‘pepsi’, I would write:
./snackbar/drink/price

‘Calories’ tag appears just once in the structure, so I can directly use double slashes to retrieve the value ’1000′:
.//calories

To retrieve the value of the attribute for the name ‘pepsi’, I could use:
./snackbar/drink/name/@id

Note: It has been noted that in case a particular tag does not have a value, instead of returning NULL, in some cases Siebel returns the whitespace character, ‘ ‘.

There is more to this. However, what I have covered above are the only ones I have seen working in Siebel successfully.
I have split this blog into parts because of the length. Part II of this article will follow.

Related posts:

Siebel – Left, Right and from the Middle Extracting a sub string from a lengthy string in Siebel....

Siebel – FINS Industry XML Query Service “Extracting values from a tag deep down in the Hierarchy.”...

GeeKs Blogging @ dotCOM » EAI

netstat command

XPath Expressions in XML – Part I