A few weeks ago I wrote about the Performance Data Collectors in IBM i. You can collect many different kinds of performance data, but once you have the data, what is the best way to view and analyze that data? Use the Performance Data Investigator. If you are on 6.1 or 7.1 you already have it.
The Performance Data Investigator was introduced with the 6.1 release and is found in the Navigator for i web console; it is not available in System i Navigator (and it will never be in System i Navigator).
Within the Navigator browser console, you will find the Performance tasks in the left-hand navigation pane. When you select the Performance tasks, you will see the following options:
The Investigate Data option is how you access the Performance Data Investigator. When you take the Investigate Data option, you will see something like the following image:
The initial list of perspectives shows you the set of content packages that are available; a content package is simply a grouping of perspectives for the same type of performance data. The Collection Services content package contains all the graphs and tables for Collection Services data. Which content packages you see depends upon what options of the Performance Tools licensed program product are installed.
You will always see Collection Services and Health Indicators; the capability to view and analyze Collection Services data is part of the base operating system and no other product is necessary.
However, if you want to analyze Disk Watcher or Performance Explorer data, you will need to have the Performance Tools product, Manager feature installed. To analyze Job Watcher data, you need to have the Performance Tools product, Job Watcher feature installed. Below is a screen capture of the Performance Tools product with all the options installed:
On the main Investigate Data panel, open the type of performance data you want to analyze – for example, you can expand the Collection Services folder to show the following navigation:
You can see that the list of perspectives (which is simply a fancy name for a graph or table) is organized by the type of information you want to see. You can further expand the folders to find the perspective you want to view. Once you have identified the view you want to see, you can display it.
Note at the bottom of the screen you have the capability to select which performance data collection you want to display, so you can have various performance data collections in different libraries.
Once you have identified the graph or table you want to display along with the performance collection you want to use, you display the data. An example of what a graph looks like is below:
The Performance Data Investigator has a wealth of capabilities; for a more complete article on the Performance Data Investigator, please refer to the IBM i Performance Data Investigator article on the developerWorks site.
Finally, here is a list of prior blogs with information related to the Performance Data Investigator:
Investigate Performance Data
Display CPU Utilization for all Partitions
Tell You Why You Are Waiting
Understand Scaled CPU Time
Measure Disk Response Times
Customizing a Perspective in PDI
Find All My Performance Collections in One Place
Job Performance Information
Performance Data Collectors in IBM i
This blog post was originally published on IBMSystemsMag.com and is reproduced here by permission of IBM Systems Media.