Apple uses a variant of the Unix operating system and its uses the Unix top command to return the CPU utilization.

The value returned from the ''TOP'' command may look like this:

The numbers below were added to provide clarity. You will not see these when you run Top on the remote system.

Bobs$ /usr/bin/top -l 1 grep CPU

1----------2 ----3--------4-------5------6-----7--------8

CPU usage: 1.59% user, 7.44% sys, 96.95% idle

The way that the SiteScope CPU monitor works on Mac OSX is to simply log on to the remote server as the user specified in the Remote UNIX area of SiteScope, and then issue the command for CPU utilization stored for that particular OS' template file. These commands are contained in the SiteScope/templates.OS directory, and there is a separate configuration file for each type of Operating System.

The most common issue is that the output for the TOP command has been altered from version to version of TOP, and so the template SiteScope uses to get CPU data has to be changed.

To obtain CPU Utilization the specific value that SiteScope keys off is the IDLE data field returned from Top. Specifically the formula SiteScope uses is:

100% - %Idle = %Utilization

This is important because in the entries below you will see a line labeled:

idle=x

This specifies which field SiteScope is looking for the IDLE value in. If your Mac OSX server outputs the IDLE value to a different column, then the entry will need to be changed in the configuration file.

For Example, with the Top command shown about, you would use using the following configuration file entry

id=cpu

command=/usr/bin/top -l 3 | grep Load

idle= 7

startLine=1

If this does not work the first time, try changing the idle value up or down by one until data is returned.