This week IBM announced software enhancements for IBM i. Included in this announcement are enhancements to the Performance Data Investigator. If you’re not familiar with the Performance Data Investigator, it was a major new function introduced with IBM i 6.1 in the Navigator for i Web console.
The performance tasks include improved management of performance data, as well as the Investigate Data task. Investigate Data provides a browser-based GUI to view and analyze IBM i performance data. Since its release in April 2008, the development team has continued to work on many improvements and additional features.Below I’ve summarized the major changes to the Performance Data Investigator that are now available. This is just an overview; you can anticipate future blog posts that’ll provide more detailed information on several of these features.
Health Indicators
Health indicators are simple charts that can give you a quick overview of the general performance characteristics on your partition. You can get a quick view of CPU, memory, disk and 5250 response times.
Performance Explorer
Performance Explorer lists are for PEX profile data and can be used to analyze the performance of an application program. The Performance Explorer content package also allows you to view the PEX database files.
Additional Charts
Several additional charts have been added to the Collection Services set of charts. The highlights of the new charts include:
- Physical system–The physical system charts display the overall CPU utilization for the physical box, for all partitions, regardless of operating system.
- Communications–The communications charts provide graphical views of communications metrics.
- Virtual I/O–Charts on Virtual I/O metrics have been added.
- Scaled CPU time–Scaled CPU time comes into play when EnergyScale functionality is used on POWER6 processor-based systems. Scaled CPU time will be displayed on some charts along with CPU time.
Improved Navigation
Ease-of-use improvements have been made in general navigation features. In addition, as you use various drill-down options, the navigation history is easier to view.
Export
A new action, Export, allows the specified chart or table to be exported in one of several formats. You can get the data into a spreadsheet, for example, for manipulation there, or you can export charts as images.
Modify SQL
In the initial offering of the Investigate Data features, you could show the SQL statements that retrieved the data behind the charts and tables. With the new enhancements, show SQL has been changed to modify SQL, which lets you customize the IBM-supplied queries.
Size Next Upgrade
The Size Next Upgrade action allows for sending data from Collection Services to the IBM Systems Workload Estimator for a one-time capacity planning exercise.
Design Mode
Design mode allows you to create your own unique charts and tables. You can use design mode to extend the IBM-supplied perspective or create your own analysis and reporting information. You can also use design mode on database files that contain data other than performance data.
Metric Finder
A new Search option allows you to search through the metrics that are available and you can find the charts and tables where the selected metric is available.
These enhancements are included in PTFs SI35659, SI35663 and SI35833.
This blog post was edited for currency on January 26, 2020.
This blog post was originally published on IBMSystemsMag.com and is reproduced here by permission of IBM Systems Media.