I’m sure many (most?) of you still use Work with System Status (WRKSYSSTS) as the way to review your overall system status, including memory pools and faulting on IBM i. After all, that first view gives you a lot of useful information…CPU utilization, jobs in the system, storage used, and of course, faulting information.
My screen capture below is uninteresting.
What if I suggest another way to look at this same information? Where you can customize what you want to see? You just need to use the GUI, in particular, the Navigator Web console.
If you have been using WRKSYSSTS and want to explore the GUI, you’ll find System → System Status and may assume that will give you the WRKSYSSTS information on the GUI. Perhaps you tried this with Navigator before and didn’t find what you were looking for? The information on the GUI via System Status is much of what you find on the top half of the WRKSYSSTS display.
Since System Status doesn’t give you the faulting information, you need to go to the Active Memory Pools view.
But wait! When you open that view, you don’t see faulting information there either!
There’s a trick. You need to customize the columns that are displayed – there are many places in the GUI where you can get at more information by customizing columns. Take the Actions drop down and go to Columns…
Add in the columns you want and adjust the order to suit your preferences. The changes you make are saved and you’ll see that customized version from now on.
Here’s a screen capture of my version of Active Memory Pools – I have all the metrics I want to see in one table. Again, my system is uninteresting.
Another hint: if you select a specific memory pool (one that has a lot of faulting, perhaps), you can right click to view the jobs and subsystems associated with that memory pool.
And here’s the treat! There’s another big advantage when you use the Navigator GUI –integration between the work management tasks and the performance tasks, which I wrote about in the blog Work Management Integration with Performance Tasks.
In the case of Active Memory Pools, you can go directly to the Memory Pools Health Indicators in the Performance Data Investigator.
The Memory Pools Health Indicators can give you an indication of whether your faulting rates may be too high.
From the Memory Pools Health Indicators, you can then drill down into more detailed information regarding your memory pool sizes and fault rates using Collection Services data. And I’ll write more about that next week.
This blog post was edited for currency on March 29, 2020.
This blog post was originally published on IBMSystemsMag.com and is reproduced here by permission of IBM Systems Media.