OSI/AS Configuration and Management Manual

Performance Considerations
OSI/AS Configuration and Management Manual—424119-001
6-13
What Tools to Use
At first, monitoring should be frequent and very comprehensive. When the system
stabilizes, monitoring activity may be reduced. Your monitoring activity must always be
frequent enough and comprehensive enough to detect problems before they affect the
users. To effectively monitor performance on your system, you need to determine the
following:
•
What Tools to Use on this page
•
What Performance Indicators to Monitor on page 6-13
•
When to Monitor Performance on page 6-14
What Tools to Use
You can monitor performance using various hardware and software tools, either through
operator-initiated actions or program-initiated actions. Hardware monitoring is
performed using response-time monitors, line monitors, and other hardware monitors, to
determine what is happening in the CPU or on the communications lines. Software
monitoring tools include traces, SCF, DSM, console messages, Measure, ViewSys, event
messages, and Inspect. Note that the software monitoring tools may, themselves,
negatively effect performance because they use resources that would otherwise be
available to your applications.
What Performance Indicators to Monitor
Your goal in performance analysis and monitoring is to define both the adequacy and the
limits of your system. These activities, however, must be evaluated in terms of the
amount of performance benefit that can be obtained versus the expense of the resources.
To improve performance, it is necessary to obtain a comprehensive picture of the
subsystem, the major applications, and the resources used by each of them. This
information can be divided into four types of data:
•
Current system configuration. You can determine the current system configuration
and OSI/AS subsystem attributes using the SCF CHECK, INFO, and STATUS
commands. These commands provide information on thresholds, number of
processes, and other attribute values. (For more detailed discussion on using the
CHECK command to obtain configuration information, see Verifying Your
Configuration on page 4-43.)
•
Performance statistics. You can determine the amount of data sent and received by
using the SCF STATS command. Use the SCF STATS command to also look at
TLAM (on D-series releases) or PAM (on G06 and above releases) port statistics;
the value of undelivered AG SDUs might be an indication of an improper
configuration.) You can determine response time using response time monitors or by
manually clocking responses at the terminals. Measure can be used to determine
utilizations of CPUs, disks, processes, and more. ViewSys can be used to obtain a
dynamic snapshot of the activities in the system.
•
Data sent and received over communications lines. You can determine the content of
the data sent and received over the communications lines by using a line monitor.
The SCF TRACE command is not recommended for this use because it can
seriously reduce the throughput of the entire system. In addition, data is truncated if
the data frames are larger than the trace frames.