Enhancements to IBM i Performance Data
It’s been quite a while since I’ve written about the improved temporary storage tracking in the 7.2 release. Part 1 covered changes that provide improved tracking, part 2 covered changes made to help you better understand temporary storage consumption at a system level, and part 3 covered changes made to help you better understand temporary storage consumption at a job level. You may want to take a look at these posts if you have not done so already.
This week I’m going to review the additional temporary storage metrics that are now collected by Collection Services and the new perspectives to visualize those metrics that have been added to the Performance Data Investigator.
As part of the 7.2 release, Collection Services was enhanced to collect additional metrics to aid in understanding the use of temporary storage. New fields were added for jobs (QAPMJOBMI file) that provide additional information regarding temporary storage use at the job level and new fields were added at the system level (QAPMSYSTEM file) to provide a view of temporary storage use systemwide. While these metrics are very valuable, you had to query the Collection Services files directly to access this new data since there was no ability to view these new metrics with the Performance Data Investigator. Until this past December.
In the last blog I wrote, Navigator for i Enhancements are Available, I made a brief mention of new “Temporary Storage” perspectives that have been added to the Performance Data Investigator. These new perspectives (charts) allow you to visualize the new temporary storage tracking metrics that are now in Collection Services.
To find these new charts, go to the Investigate Data task and open the Collection Services group of perspectives. You will find a folder named Storage Allocation. Drill into that folder and expand the folder named Temporary Storage, in which you will find the new perspectives. You will discover various ways to view the new metrics for tracking temporary storage – an overview of system use, by job or thread, job user profile or current user profile, and more, as the following screen capture shows.
The Temporary Storage Allocation/Deallocation Overview shows a system-wide view of temporary storage allocated and deallocated over time. If you think you have a temporary storage issue, you can use this chart to gain insight into when issues might have started by using this graph. When you know when, you can then drill down into other graphs to help you identify who initiated your problem.
If you go back and look at the Storage Allocation folder, you will see a couple of additional perspectives – I previously blogged about these perspectives in “IBM i Storage Allocation Perspectives.” These perspectives include both temporary and permanent storage and are available on releases 6.1 and later.
A nice thing about Collection Services data is that you can look backward in time. You might discover you have a temporary storage issue via a quick look at WRKSYSSTS, but when did it start and who is the guilty party? These new graphs in Collection Services give you a nice way to answer those questions.
There’s one more tip I’d like to provide. Support was also to the System Monitors in 7.2 to allow you to monitor temporary storage utilization. The monitor metric Temporary Storage Utilization allows you to proactively manage temporary storage use without manually checking on the system.
This blog post was edited for currency on April 12, 2020.
This blog post was originally published on IBMSystemsMag.com and is reproduced here by permission of IBM Systems Media.