i Can: Performance Data Investigator

Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30	31

Performance Data Investigator—Better Than Ever

Today is another IBM Announcement Day and you’ll be hearing about all the great things that IBM is making available; but there’s a secret enhancement for IBM i users that I’m going to share with you.

The Performance Data Investigator, which was introduced with the 6.1 release in the Systems Director Navigator Web console, is being enhanced with some great new features.

The Performance Data Investigator, or PDI for those that like to shorten things to Three Letter Acronyms, is a graphical user interface for viewing and analyzing IBM i performance data.

The IBM i announcement letter was vague at best when covering these enhancements; it mentioned “IBM Navigator for i usability and performance enhancements", but the RFA didn’t provide many more details. Tim Rowe’s blog will review some of the enhancements announced this week as well, but I wanted to provide details on PDI specifically. PDI is part of the product that is now called IBM Navigator for i (it used to be IBM Systems Director Navigator for i; the new name is much better!)

The following are the enhancements being made to the Performance Data Investigator:

Integration with Database Performance Tooling
IBM i System Performance Management and IBM i Database Performance Management have historically been distinct tasks. That is now changing and there is some wonderful integration being added between systems performance data and DB2 performance data. You will be able to view DB2 performance information – such as SQL Plan Cache and SQL Performance Monitor data – with the Performance Data Investigator.
Performance Reports
You now have the ability to generate performance reports from PDI. In the past, you could get text-based reports from the PT1 product, but these were difficult to analyze. The performance reports provide graphical views of the performance data and can be customized to report on the metrics that are important to you.
Display Holder Information with Job Watcher data
If you had analyzed Job Watcher data with PDI, you may have discovered that you could determine if a job was waiting for a resource, but you could not drill down into the holder of that resource. The Job Watcher navigation support has now been enhanced to display the holder of the resource as well.
Java Perspectives (7.1 only)
Previously, PDI allowed you to display Java heap information, but it was system wide information. Now you will be able to display this information broken down by job so you find out what jobs are using the memory so you can look at them further.

The PDI enhancements will be available as part of the enhancements to IBM I Navigator later this year with the following group PTFs:

IBM i 7.1: 5770-SS1 SF99368 HTTP PTF Group Level 16, or later
IBM i 6.1: 5761-SS1 SF99115 HTTP PTF Group Level 28, or later

This is just a very high-level overview of the enhancements to the Performance Data Investigator. In the future, I’ll review some of these capabilities in more detail.

Posted at 10:00 AM | Permalink