System profiler

A system profiler is software that reports relatively comprehensive information about the host computer system software and attached hardware.

Historically, when computers were primarily mainframes using punch card readers for input, computers had relatively fixed configurations with little variation in input or output devices, and as such, there was little need to query the computer for information about its attached devices. The value of querying a machine for its capabilities grew as computers evolved to have more modular hardware and software designs.

The information reported by a system profiler might be available to the user although not as an integrated report. For example, the VM/370 command QUERY displays the addresses of attached devices and the size of storage.

Sometimes conflated with system profiler, a system monitor is a significantly different capability. It runs continuously in the background and measures and stores performance information. In contrast, a system profiler runs on-demand and reports what the system consists of, not how it is performing.

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