I've just noticed a new PSARC case, PSARC 2010/291: zonestat, that I know a lot of people will find very very useful.

To quote the summary from the PSARC:

This fast-track proposes the addition of a command line tool to
facilitate the observation of system resources consumed by Solaris
Zones.  The tool is specifically designed to observe the following:

	1.  Memory and cpu utilization of zones.
	2.  Utilization of resource control limits.
	3.  Resource utilization versus physical resources and
	    versus configured limits.
	4.  Various cpu-related resource partitioning schemes,
	    such as processor sets, pools, fair share scheduler,
	    and cpu-caps.
	5.  Total utilization and the per-zone break-down.
	6.  Aggregate, average, and peak utilization over specified
	    time periods.

The PSARC goes on to explain how this would done. Essentially, it would comprise three components:

  1. A zones monitoring daemon: zonestatd(1m) that would run in the global zone and perform monitoring of the system and zones. It will also respond to queries from the global zone and non-global zones and provide the requested utilisation information.
  2. A private zones monitoring library: libzonestat.so(3lib) that would be used by the CLI component to query the monitoring daemon.
  3. A zones monitoring CLI: zonestat(1) that administrators would use to display zone utilisation information.

    The PSARC includes a few usage examples, with this being the one I think most people will be using:

    Example 1: Summary of cpu and memory usage over a 5 second interval:
# zonestat 5 1
    SUMMARY
                        -----CPU------------- ----PHYSICAL--- ----VIRTUAL----
                   ZONE USED %PART %CAP %SHRU USED  PCT  %CAP  USED  PCT %CAP
                [total] 9.74   30%    -     - 7576M  23%    - 11.6G  24%    -
               [system] 0.28  0.8%    -     - 6535M  19%    - 10.4G  21%    -
                 global 9.10   28%    -     -  272M 0.8%    -  366M 0.7%    -
              kodiak-ab 0.32  1.0%    -     -  256M 0.7%    -  265M 0.5%    -
              kodiak-dp 0.00  0.0%    -     - 77.6M 0.2%    - 71.1M 0.1%    -
        kodiak-gjelinek 0.00  0.0%    -     - 58.7M 0.1%    - 59.3M 0.1%    -
             kodiak-edp 0.00  0.0%    -     - 53.0M 0.1%    - 58.9M 0.1%    -
         kodiak-johnlev 0.00  0.0%    -     - 51.9M 0.1%    - 57.4M 0.1%    -
          kodiak-jordan 0.00  0.0%    -     - 51.7M 0.1%    - 56.8M 0.1%    -
           kodiak-steve 0.00  0.0%    -     - 51.5M 0.1%    - 56.2M 0.1%    -
           kodiak-susan 0.00  0.0%    -     - 48.9M 0.1%    - 55.7M 0.1%    -
        kodiak-batschul 0.00  0.0%    -     - 48.5M 0.1%    - 49.5M 0.1%    -
         kodiak-garypen 0.00  0.0%    -     - 46.3M 0.1%    - 49.5M 0.1%    -
             kodiak-rie 0.00  0.0%    -     - 22.7M 0.0%    - 49.4M 0.1%    -

    Wow! A single simple command to assess the current utilisation of ALL zones on a system. That is going to prove to be extremely useful.

The zonestat command would also have the ability to generate machine parseable reports for a definable period of time. Provided this doesn't have too much of an impact on performance, which I doubt it will, I can see this last usage being used a fair bit by service providers.

Have a read through the details of the proposal and then cross your fingers and hope this gets the fast track approval being requested. This will be a very very useful tool and hopefully we'll see it in the not-too-distant future.