history

SIGAR was designed and implemented by Doug MacEachern at starting in Covalent Technologies September of 2002 and has continued with as a core component of the product. Hyperic HQ SIGAR is not the first attempt to provide a cross-platform API to collect system information. In fact, SIGAR was inspired by which has been around since 1998 or so and was at when the SIGAR libgtop version 1.90 project was started. Doug released a to libgtop in December of 1999 upon which Perl interface Stas Bekman implemented . Apache::VMonitor

Based on that experience, Doug had become a big fan of the libgtop concept, but in practice only had success using it on Linux and with some struggles on Solaris. At the time the SIGAR implementation decision was made, libgtop had become a GNOME component for which there only appeared to be ongoing support for Linux and did not have implementations for other required platforms such as Windows, HP-UX, AIX and Mac OS X. Another requirement was a thread-safe Java interface and the ability to ship a single package containing binaries for all . Long story short, libgtop was not the right fit for the supported platforms requirements but the concept was: An abstract interface defined by C structures and function prototypes with an underlying implementation for each platform to gather the data. So that concept was borrowed, but the implementation was done from scratch and has continued to evolve over the years with broader platform support, more features and language bindings.