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Performance Tools Can Help Maximize System Performance

Getting the most out of your investment is crucial for business success. If you're thinking of buying or have already bought an iSeries server, it's an investment you want to ensure pays the highest dividends by being in peak condition. Those responsible for maximizing iSeries performance are put on the spot to make this happen. Yet over the last few years, the number of tools and complex environments has made it a challenging task to say the least.

At this point, you may have used a plethora of tools from iSeries Navigator monitors to iDoctor for iSeries to other vendors product offerings. Regardless of your experience with these tools, it may be worth taking another look at one thats been around for many years: Performance Tools for iSeries (5722-PT1). With the introduction of V5R2, Performance Tools now offers an iSeries Navigator plug-in to show reams of data in simple-to-view graphs.

A graphical interface alone doesn't automatically make it a better tool. However, the improvements range from enabling common features such as sorting to the multiple detailed views. These improvements provide a clear view of your system performance and help find and solve performance problems before they significantly impact your business. So, if you want to find out which interactive jobs were running when the interactive CPU utilization exceeded expectations or how changing the memory pool size impacted the page-fault rate, Performance Tools can be the right tool for the job. We'll show you just a couple features to get you started in maximizing your iSeries performance. And if you want to know what a Performance Tools customer thinks, read, "A Users Perspective."

Getting Started
The plug-in can be installed in many ways including the initial iSeries Navigator installation, system Install Options available from the File menu or selective setup for an existing iSeries Navigator installation. Launch the "Selective Setup" option from the menu start>IBM iSeries Access for Windows. Select "Next" and specify the source directory such as \\QSYSTEM1\Qibm. The source directory must be the location where youve installed the Performance Tools licensed product, such as "System1" for our example. By expanding "iSeries Navigator" and scrolling down, youll eventually see the Performance Tools plug-in (see Figure 1). Checking the box next to "Performance Tools" and continuing through the selective setup downloads the plug-in and installs it on the PC. With the plug-in installed, new menu options will be available (see Figure 2).

The new Performance Tools plug-in allows several views on the data collected by the OS/400* collection facility, Collection Services, which automatically stores its data in Management Collection Objects (*MGTCOL) and can create the databases that are essential to Performance Tools. To create the databases, use either the iSeries Navigator option "Generate database files" or the Create Performance Data (CRTPFRDTA) command.

To start Performance Tools from iSeries Navigator, open the Configuration and Services folder for the system you want to analyze. Then expand "Collection Services" and right-click to select Performance Tools>Performance Data (see Figure 2). All Collection Services database file members on this system will be displayed on the Display Performance Data window (see Figure 3).

If you want to find out which interactive jobs were running when the interactive CPU utilization exceeded expectations or how changing the memory pool size impacted the page-fault rate, Performance Tools can be the right tool for the job.

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