If you are new to 6.1 or 7.1, you may not be aware that you can go to one place to see and work with all your performance collections.
When working with Performance Collections on 6.1 and beyond, some changes were made from previous releases. Along with the change in Performance Collection Tools to collect Job Watcher, Disk Watcher, Collection Services, and Performance Explorer data by the base operating system, an internal collection table was added to keep track of these collections on the system.
The Manage Collections task gives you access into this table. To view and work with all the collections on a system, start with Navigator for i. Expand Performance on the left-hand navigation pane, the expand Manage Collections.
Clicking on Manage Collections will open a tab with a table that lists all of the performance collections found on your system, from all performance collectors, including both the management collection objects (*MGTCOL) as well as generated database files.
Here you can work with your collections using the GUI interfaces to the Copy, Delete, Move, Save and Restore commands. Selecting Properties will display general and detail information about the collection. You can select action Create Performance Data on a management collection object to create the collection services file based collection. Selecting Investigate Data on a collection services file based collection, disk watcher, job watcher or PEX collection will bring up a default perspective displaying the data from the collection with one or more charts and tables.
As shown in the left-navigation screen capture above, there is also the ability to manage collections by the type of collection. This makes it easy to just review the collections of a specific type, for example, Job Watcher collections.
The collection table (located in QUSRSYS/QAPMCCCNTB) is updated whenever new collections are generated, restored or deleted from the system using the performance collection tools commands: CRTPFRCOL, RSTPFRCOL, or DLTPFRCOL (xxxPFRCOL), or the GUI equivalents as discussed above. If however, a collection was restored from another system using the RSTOBJ or RSTLIB commands, or if the collector job was ended abnormally either due to system or subsystem ending immediately, the table will not be updated automatically.
Likewise, if you use DLTLIB to remove a collection, the collection table will not be updated. The table information for collections will then be inconsistent with the actual collections that exist on the system.
If any of the above situations occur, you may not see your collection in the Collection Manager. You may notice this inconsistency when using Performance Data Investigator (Investigate Data task under Performance). The list in the collection name dropdown is populated by the collections found in the collection table, so you will not see collections not properly restored in the drop-down list.
The collection table can be rebuilt at any time to update it with the libraries and collections that exist on the system. To rebuild the table, from the Collections panel, use Actions -> Rebuild Collection Table.
This may take a few minutes. When complete, click on the Refresh button on the Manage Collections panel. The Collection Manager list will now include any previously missing libraries and collections, and any collections that were deleted will no longer be shown.
To then use Performance Data Investigator with the updated collection table, close any previously opened Investigate Data tabs, and go back in to Investigate Data. The Collection Library dropdown will now be populated with all the collections that currently exist on the system.
You will see that the Collection Name dropdown list also shows the date and time that the collection was started. The default name of the collections generated by Collection Services is ‘Q’ plus the Julian data and time. Since this is difficult for most to translate into a “real” date, adding the human-readable format of the date and time stamp makes it easier to find the collection you are looking for.
For the latest PTF information affecting the Collection Manager and Performance Data Investigator, check out the Technology Updates page Performance on the Web.
This week’s blog was written by Lora Powell. Lora works on the IBM i Performance Tools team and is the lead for the Performance Tasks GUI in IBM Systems Director Navigator. Thanks, Lora.
This blog post was edited for currency on February 18, 2020.
This blog post was originally published on IBMSystemsMag.com and is reproduced here by permission of IBM Systems Media.