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.
IBM has updated the IBM i Technology Updates developerWorks site to include additional information on the Performance Data Investigator enhancements.
The following URL will take you to the web page where you can find additional information on the topics summarized in this blog article:
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/wikis/home?lang=en#/wiki/IBM%20i%20Technology%20Updates/page/Fall%202012
The following URL takes you to a web page where you can find the details on the PTFs required for the most recent enhancements.
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/wikis/home?lang=en#/wiki/IBM%20i%20Technology%20Updates/page/Performance%20on%20the%20web
Dawn
Posted by: Dawn May | January 09, 2013 at 05:50 PM