Here at PARSEC Group, we often instigate or participate in VMS system performance analysis and capacity planning, and the data gathering tool we reach for, or recommend to our customers, is the free T4 (“Total Timeline Tracking Tool”) which was written by members of the original DEC VMS Engineering Team. This toolkit is provided free of charge

T4 is currently available through HPE here:

• T4 Product Description
• T4 FAQ
• T4 Documentation
• Download the T4 Installation Kit

• Technical Article: Timeline-Driven Collaboration with "T4 & Friends": A Timesaving Approach to OpenVMS Performance; OpenVMS Technical Journal, Volume 3, January 2004
• Adding a Friend to T4 and Friends: Incorporating BEA WebLogic Server 8.1 Performance Data; OpenVMS Technical Journal, Volume 4, June 2004
• Technical Article: RMS Collector; OpenVMS Technical Journal, Volume 11

See OpenVMS Technical Journals online for a list of all of these valuable documents online.

Wayne Sauer, PARSEC founder and VMS internals expert, has written extensively about using T4 for VMS performance analysis, and has given many DECUS and technical conference presentations – here's a representative slide-deck:

• Using Free Tools to Analyze OpenVMS Performance

And here's a great presentation by Keith W Hare, JCC Consulting Inc., about using T4 for gathering Oracle/Rdb performance data:

• Tracking Rdb Performance Using T4