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. Below are several enhancements that were made to the Performance Data Investigator in October of 2012:
- Integration with Database Performance Tooling
IBM i System Performance Management and IBM i Database Performance Management were historically distinct tasks. That was changed and there was integration added between systems performance data and Db2 performance data. You can view Db2 performance information – such as SQL Plan Cache and SQL Performance Monitor data – with the Performance Data Investigator.
- Performance Reports
The ability to generate performance reports was added. 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 was enhanced to display the holder of the resource as well.
- Java Perspectives (7.1 and later)
Previously, PDI allowed you to display Java heap information, but it was system wide information. The ability to display JVM information broken down by job allows you to find out what jobs are using the most memory so you can look at those jobs further.
The PDI enhancements were delivered as part of the enhancements to IBM i Navigator in late 2012 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.
This post was edited for currency on February 27, 2020.
This blog post was originally published on IBMSystemsMag.com and is reproduced here by permission of IBM Systems Media.