Monitoring performance with Tivoli Performance Viewer

Tivoli® Performance Viewer enables administrators and programmers to monitor the overall health of WebSphere® Application Server from within the administrative console.

Before you begin

In Version 4.0, Tivoli Performance Viewer was named the Resource Analyzer. In Version 5.0, Tivoli Performance Viewer is a stand-alone Java™ application. In Versions 6.0.x and later, Tivoli Performance Viewer is embedded in the administrative console. From Tivoli Performance Viewer, you can view current activity and summary reports, or log Performance Monitoring Infrastructure (PMI) performance data. Tivoli Performance Viewer provides a simple viewer for the performance data collected by the Performance Monitoring Infrastructure.

About this task

By viewing Tivoli Performance Viewer data, administrators can determine which part of the application and configuration settings to change in order to improve performance. For example, you can view the servlet summary reports, enterprise beans, and Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) methods in order to determine what part of the application to focus on. Then, you can sort these tables to determine which of these resources has the highest response time. Focus on improving the configuration for those application resources taking the longest response time.

Procedure

  1. Optional: Adjust the Performance Monitoring Infrastructure (PMI) settings for the servers that you want to monitor.
    The PMI service is enabled by default with a basic set of counters enabled.
  2. Monitor current server activity.
    You can view real-time data on the current performance activity of a server using Tivoli Performance Viewer in the administrative console.
    • Use the performance advisors to examine various data while your application is running. The performance advisor in Tivoli Performance Viewer provides advice to help tune systems for optimal performance by using collected PMI data.
    • Configure user and logging settings for Tivoli Performance Viewer. These settings may affect the performance of your application server.
    • View summary reports on servlets, Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) methods, connections pools and thread pools in WebSphere Application Server.
    • View performance modules that provide graphs and of various performance data on system resources such as CPU utilization, on WebSphere pools and queues such as database connection pools, and on customer application data such as servlet response time. In addition to providing a viewer for performance data, Tivoli Performance Viewer enables you to view data for other products or customer applications that have implemented custom PMI.
    [IBM i]
    • WebSphere Application Server Version 8 for IBM® i requires Portable Application Solutions Environment (PASE), 5761SS1 (IBM i 6.1) or 5770SS1 (IBM i 7.1) option 33, for graphics
  3. View server performance logs.
    You can record and view data that has been logged by Tivoli Performance Viewer in the administrative console. Be sure to configure user and logging settings for Tivoli Performance Viewer.
  4. Log performance data.
    You can record real-time data for later retrieval and analysis.