Presentation Abstracts

Performance Presentations

Note:  All references to Navigator for i refer to New Nav and all sessions have been updated accordingly.

Case Studies of Common Performance Failures

There are many common performance problems that can impact almost any shop. This session will review real-world performance issues, covering the details of the issue, the impact to the business, and the analysis that was done to identify and resolve the problem. Understanding these common problems can help you prevent them from happening in your shop.

Understand Your IBM i Performance Signature

IBM i often runs well with little or no focus on the performance of the system. But what if something unexpected does occur? If you understand the performance signature of your system when it is running well, it becomes much easier to identify problems if something goes wrong. This session will show you how to use the Performance Data Investigator to understand your day-to-day performance signature, as well as Graph History to understand long-term trends over weeks, months, and years.

IBM i Navigator Performance Tasks

The IBM i Navigator performance tasks are a feature-rich set of tasks that allow you to understand the health and performance of your IBM i partition. This session, presented as a live demo, reviews all of the performance tasks in Navigator, showing how you can use the Performance Data Investigator to graphically view your IBM i performance data, monitor your performance in near-real-time with system monitors, and understand your performance trends with graph history. Time will be spent explaining how to interpret many example charts using Investigate Data.

Introduction to the IBM i Performance Data Investigator

IBM Navigator for i has a rich set of performance tasks that include many traditional i performance management capabilities. It also has the ability to manage your performance data collections. The most exciting feature is the `Investigate Data` task, which provides the ability to graphically view your IBM i performance data through a browser interface; Collection Services, Disk Watcher, Job Watcher, and Performance Explorer data can all be ‘investigated’. This session will go through the capabilities of the Performance Data Investigator, including an overview of many exciting enhancements that have been been added in recent releases. You will learn how to look at your performance data through the Performance Data Investigator, discover various IBM-supplied views of your performance data, and how you can use also use the performance tasks for monitoring and trending. 

The IBM i Performance Data Investigator Gets a Makeover

The IBM i Performance Data Investigator (PDI) provides a graphical interface to your performance data. PDI has recently been given a makeover with a new charting engine.  This session will provide a brief introduction to PDI, then focus on the new and improved features that allow you to visualize your performance data.

Predictive Performance Management

Can the past predict the future? What about the present – right here and now? And if you know the past, and can predict the future, how can you determine the impact to your applications?

Performance management on IBM i has proactive monitoring features and historical data capabilities, as well as application performance modeling. Attend this session to learn how you can use monitoring to identify and resolve potential issues before they become actual problems, learn about historical performance data and how you can use the past trends to plan for the future, and application modeling to understand what hardware changes will mean to your applications.

Understanding IBM i Historical Performance Data

In the 7.3 release, IBM enhanced Collection Services to collect historical performance data. In addition, Navigator for i was enhanced to display historical data with the Graph History task. This presentation will review the historical data collection support and review how you can use Graph History to understand the trends on your system to be prepared for the future.

Best Practices for IBM i Performance Management

Knowing about the tools and techniques for performance management is necessary, but understanding the overall performance management life-cycle and applying best practices to each aspect of performance is essential.  End-to-end performance management includes work to size and plan for system hardware and software changes, monitoring the ongoing performance of the solution, doing detailed performance analysis when necessary, and trending your performance characteristics over time. This session focuses on this performance management life-cycle and reviews the best practices to keep your hardware and software performing at their very best.

Why Wait?  Discover the Power of IBM i Wait Accounting

IBM i wait accounting is a powerful capability to determine what your jobs are doing when they are not using the CPU. This session will review wait accounting and how Collection Services data can provide insight into your wait times. It will then focus on how to use Job Watcher, the power of the data it provides, and how to leverage Performance Data Investigator (PDI) to analyze the data. The presentation will work through example scenarios, showing performance graphs and describing what those graphs tell you. These examples will reinforce how you can use Job Watcher data in combination with PDI to analyze your performance data and resolve issues in your own environment. This session will reveal the power of IBM i wait accounting and the insight it can provide so you can optimize the performance of your applications and system environment.

IBM i Performance Tools for Application Developers

Application developers should consider the performance characteristics of new and changed applications as part of the development process. After all, finding a performance problem during the test phase is far better than having an issue occur on production. This presentation will review the primary tools IBM i developers have available to them to understand the performance of their applications. This session will review Wait Accounting, Job Watcher, and Performance Explorer and how these tools can be used to understand the performance characteristics of your applications.

Investigate Database Performance the Navigator Way

You may have heard about the Performance Data Investigator. You may know how to use the Navigator tasks to collect database and SQL performance data. But did you know you can bring together the best of both? The Performance Data Investigator (PDI) has some significant features that allow you to visualize database performance data in graphical form. In addition, Collection Services collects SQL job-level performance metrics. Attend this session to learn about how to use PDI to graphically view your database performance metrics and get some tips on what those metrics mean.

Work Management and Systems Management Presentations

Note:  All references to Navigator for i refer to New Nav and all sessions have been updated accordingly.

Manage Your IBM i the Navigator Way

This session, primarily presented as a live demo, will show you how you can manage your system via Navigator for i using the Work Management, Configuration and Service, and System tasks.  Learn how you can review active jobs, server jobs, prestart jobs, JVMs and more. You can also use Navigator to configure your subsystems and subsystem routing. This session will include all the new and exciting features in Navigator for managing you IBM i.  This session will also include common Navigator features such as bookmarks, favorites, connection properties, and much more.

Navigator for i: Better than Ever

Navigator for i, initially called New Nav when it was first released, has become a feature-rich interface for managing your IBM i partitions. This presentation, primarily in demo form, will review the latest new features that have been added to Navigator. Learn about how you can easily vie security audit entries, manage active prestart jobs, and review your JVMs. You can also manage exit programs, watches, and more with Navigator for i.

Everything You Need to Know About the IBM i Administration Runtime Expert

Business-critical applications must be up and running reliably without failure. When something unexpected occurs, you must identify the cause and correct it quickly.  The relentless push to do more with less is only going to intensify while the tolerance for failure keeps dropping.  Yet identifying points of failure can be tricky as complexities scale. 

IBM i offers a product at no additional charge that helps ascertain application and infrastructure health. The IBM Administration Runtime Expert for i (ARE) can be used to define attributes of a healthy environment and use those defined attributes to validate that the environment is as expected.

This session will cover everything you need to know about ARE.

• Overview of what ARE is and example use cases
• Prerequisites, installation, and logging into the ARE console
• Creating and editing templates
• Setting up system groups, verification options, and verifying systems
• Understanding the reports
• Fix actions
• Using ARE for PTF management

Take Control of IBM i Prestart Server Jobs

Prestart jobs are used to service requests from clients in the network. There are many uses of prestart jobs on IBM i, the most common is the database server. Prestart jobs present many challenges for how to understand what is happening on the system and the work that these jobs handle. This session will review all the key characteristics of prestart jobs and provide many tips to better understand what is happening on your system.

Subsystem Configuration for Server Jobs

There are many types of server jobs on IBM i, which all have a system-supplied default subsystem in which they run. This presentation will review how to configure your system so server jobs can run in customized subsystems. Subsystem configuration has benefits for performance considerations as well as making it easier to understand what work is done by these server jobs. This session will review how to configure the subsystems for the host servers, SQL server mode jobs, the HTTP Server, FTP, SMTP, SSH, and more.

IBM i Services for the System Administrator

IBM i Services is a hot topic today and you’ve probably heard about these SQL interfaces that provide access to useful system information.  Traditional interfaces such as commands, displays, outfiles, APIs, and the Navigator GUI provide access to IBM i management information, but with the IBM i Services, you can now use SQL to access much of this information.  SQL provides additional flexibility, allowing you to determine what data you want to review and how you want to organize that data.  Attend this webinar to learn more about these services and how they can extend your IBM i management toolset.

System Health Review

Understanding the health of your system is critical whether you have a large environment or a small one.  There are many things you should be looking at on a regular basis, from system resource utilization, disk storage consumption, workload trends, and more.  This presentation will review all the important areas for a system health review, as well as how to put a plan in place to understand changes over time to prevent potential issues from becoming real ones.

Manage Work Better with Better Work Management

The IBM i 7.2 and later releases include significant enhancements for managing temporary storage on IBM i; the management of temporary storage is now more robust and there are additional ways to determine what jobs are consuming temporary storage.  In addition to improved temporary storage management, recent IBM i releases all feature better work management enhancements.

13 Years of  ‘i Can’ – Top Tips for IBM i

The ‘i Can’ blog started in August of 2009. https://ibmsystemsmag.com/power-systems/i-can-blog and the archive site at http://archive.ibmsystemsmag.com/blogs/i-can/.   Over the past 13 years, more than 400 articles have been written on various subjects, many of which are technical tips.  In this session, Dawn will review her favorite tips as well as some hidden gems.

Back to Basics Series

This set of presentations covers introductory material that is important for all IBM i professionals to know.  With many new to the platform, these topics help gain an understanding of fundamental topics.  It is also useful to have refresher courses from time to time.  This series is a work in progress with more content being added over time.

Back to Basics:  Message Handling for Dummies

Message handling is the foundation of many things that happen on the system.  Request processors handle request messages, messages are sent to standard message queues as well as program message queues; programs can communicate between each other with messages, users can communicate with each other using messages.  You can monitor for messages to proactively take action when important issues occur.  This “Back to Basics” session covers all fundamental message handling concepts every IBM i professional needs to know.