i Can Blog Archive

IBM i sits at the core of many businesses, small and large. It quietly runs business transactions and manages the crown jewels of the company: business data. IBM i is surrounded by other technologies accessing that data without a thought. It quietly runs the business, often tucked away with little attention paid to it. Just one or two administrators versus teams of people managing everything around it.  IBM i simply works. Until it doesn’t.

Ease of use is often cited as a benefit of running IBM i. The tightly integrated nature of the system makes it easy to manage. In one box you’ll find the base operating system, advanced networking, HTTP servers, file systems, and critically, the database. It simply works, but under the covers, the system is quite complex featuring hundreds of parameters for tuning and controlling the system, with shipped defaults that generally work well, but not always. The learning curve required to manage the system and keep it running well can be steep. Very often tuning is done with a “set it and forget it” mentally, but workloads shift and change. Minor adjustments accrue over time making tuning an ongoing necessity. 

Understanding all the parameters, identifying which ones are important and which ones need to be adjusted can be daunting for those without years of experience. Even experienced administrators are often unaware of key tuning features. There’s just so much to know that one person simply cannot know everything.

The Value of IBM i System Data and System Configuration

IBM i collects incredible amounts of system data to assist tuning decisions. You may not even be aware of this data. Collection Services, the SQL Plan Cache, Index Advice, and optional Job Watcher data all provide insight into how the system is running. But understanding this data is also daunting. What do charts of Collection Services data presented in the Investigate Data task of Navigator tell you? With hundreds of advised indexes, which ones are the most important to create?

Yes, everyone should increase their knowledge of the platform they are working on, but I also encourage leveraging tools to make your job easier. Software advances in AI and ML can and should be used to help. New software that can understand IBM i like never before is available. i-Rays is built to understand and exploit IBM i performance data including Collection Services, the plan cache, and more. With built-in AI/ML, i-Rays learns your typical performance signature and then identifies anomalies. In addition, i-Rays can help identify what needs to be tuned to improve system performance. Over time, i-Rays can automatically tune the system for you.