IBM i Performance Analysis

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you no doubt have come to realize how very fortunate we are on IBM i in the realm of performance tools and performance management. From the seamless instrumentation of metrics, to the various performance data collectors (all included in the operating system), to the powerful graphical tools that are available to help analyze the data. Couple that with the benefit of the patented wait accounting technology, and it’s clear that we have an impressive end-to-end suite of technologies at our disposal to monitor, manage and solve performance problems.

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Commands to Manage Performance Collections

A few weeks ago I wrote about the various Performance Data Collectors in IBM i. It’s great to be able to collect such a wide variety of performance data, but what do you do when you want to manage that data? Maybe you have the need to do some analysis on a particular performance data collection, but you do not want to run the analysis tools (which have overhead) on your production partition. How do you move that collection to a different partition? Or maybe you are trying to develop a strategy for how to save (and possibly restore) your performance data; you never know when you might need a performance collection from a critical time period for comparison purposes if something goes wrong. Perhaps you simply want an easy way to delete some performance data that you no longer need.

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Performance Data Collectors in IBM i

There were significant changes to the IBM i performance tools in the 6.1 release. The ability to collect additional types of performance data, management of this data, and a graphical interface for viewing and analyzing this data were added. The information covered in this blog pertains to all current releases of i.

A good place to start is to review the performance data collectors available on i.

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Performance Data Investigator—Better Than Ever

The Performance Data Investigator, or PDI for those that like to shorten things to Three Letter Acronyms, is a graphical user interface for viewing and analyzing IBM i performance data. Below are several enhancements that were made to the Performance Data Investigator in October of 2012:

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