Solaris 11 active process discovery without /usr/ucb

Paul Ciarfella · ‎07-11-2017

The Solaris probe "Solaris - Active Processes" requires /usr/ucb/ps. But our server architect is against installing /usr/ucb and polluting the beauty of the Solaris installation with outside packages.

Has anyone successfully modified active process discovery to support Solaris 11 without /usr/ucb installed? Discovery documentation says its required for Solaris 10 and below, and /usr/bin/ps for Solaris 11, but the probes definitely do not work on Solaris 11 if /usr/ucb is not installed.

I'm thinking we're going to need to write a custom probe assuming that the output from /usr/bin/ps can be output in a compatible digestible format.

Paul Ciarfella · ‎07-12-2017

So the answer is that Solaris 11 provides a backwards compatibility option for /usr/bin/ps to generate output that matches the ucb version of ps.

For example, the "Solaris - Active Processes" probe runs "/usr/ucb/ps -awwx" to get process information.

The equivalent Solaris 11 ps command is "/usr/bin/ps awwx". Eliminating the leading '-' in the command arg tells ps to go retro and run like the ucb ps.

I modified the bash script in the probe to check the OS version and run the ucb ps or the Solaris 11 ps depending on OS (11 or 5.11 for example).

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jimfreeman · ‎12-06-2017

I sure wish Oracle would document this BSD compatibility mode (/usr/bin/ps awwx), and if it's available starting with the first rev of v11.

Jim