POS Transaction Analyzer User and Installation Guide, SST Version 1.2

HP NonStop POS Transaction Analyzer: Overview 13
1-4-1 POS/TA Backend Components
The POS/TA installation on the HP NonStop Server installs the following components on the backend.
• $PTPnn
$PTPnn is the POS/TA Record collector component installed on the HP NonStop Server. It collects and
transfers data from the POS transaction log file (PTLF) to a temporary database called PTLFDB. A single
NonStop backend might have multiple $PTPnn processes, one for each LNET configured within the
environment. Each process can be started in the desired CPU to balance the load.
• PTLFDB
PTLFDB is a temporary database, which acts as a Store-and-Forward (SAF) file to deal with network outage
problems. The data in PTLFDB is written by $PTPnn. Multiple $PTPnn processes use file-locking facility to
synchronize data writing to this SAF database. The database size can be configured as per customer
requirement. A size of 350 MB is good enough to hold a million transactions in the SAF database.
• MAST-DB
MAST-DB is an enscribe database file, which stores the offset of the last record in the PTLFDB file so that
collector can write the next records from this offset in temporary database PTLFDB.
• $PTPRD
$PTPRD is the POS/TA Feeder component, which feeds the collected data from the temporary database to
the Elink on the HP NonStop Server.
• $PTPLK
$PTPLK is the communication middle-ware, acting as a gateway between the HP NonStop system and the
front-end. This acts as a transport layer to send/receive database application with data.
• $PTPMN
This is the main POS/TA process, running as a process pair to make the solution fault-tolerant. This process
monitors all the backend components and restarts them in case of failures.
• BESTATUS
BESTATUS is a diagnostic utility to display the overall HP NonStop status.
• $PTPLG
$PTPLG is the POS/TA logger component responsible for logging information to the PTLFLOG file and EMS
events to the desired collector.
• PTLFCONF
PTLFCONF is the configuration file for POS/TA.
• ELKCONF
ELKCONF is the configuration file for the backend Elink component.
• Collector
Collectors are the event collectors at the backend. $0 is the default collector, but user can change the
collector for event messages by changing the collector parameter in the PTLFCONF file.
NOTE: All the POS/TA HP NonStop components have the “PT” prefix by default. You can change the process
prefix during installation.
HP NonStop POS Transaction Analyzer: Overview