Why use Tivoli Performance Viewer?

Administrators and programmers can monitor the overall health of WebSphere® Application Server from within the administrative console by using Tivoli® Performance Viewer.

From Tivoli Performance Viewer, you can view current activity or log Performance Monitoring Infrastructure (PMI) performance data for the following:

• System resources such as CPU utilization
• WebSphere pools and queues such as a database connection pool
• Customer application data such as average servlet response time

You can also view data for other products or customer applications that implement custom PMI by using Tivoli Performance Viewer. For more information on custom PMI, refer to Enabling PMI data collection.

By viewing PMI data, administrators can determine which part of the application and configuration settings to alter in order to improve performance. For example, in order to determine what part of the application to focus on, you can view the servlet summary report, enterprise beans and Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) methods, and determine which of these resources has the highest response time. You can then focus on improving the configuration for those application resources with the longest response times.

Tivoli Performance Viewer is used to help manage configuration settings by viewing the various graphs or using the Tivoli Performance Advisor. For example, by looking at the summary chart for thread pools, you can determine whether the thread pool size needs to be increased or decreased by monitoring the percent (%) usage. After configuration settings are changed based on the data provided, you can determine the effectiveness of the changes. To help with configuration settings, use the Tivoli Performance Advisor. The Advisor assesses various data while your application is running, and provides configuration setting advice to improve performance.