Analyze your iSeries performance more effectively.

Is your system running poorly and you don't understand why? Is the CPU underutilized, but customers are complaining about jobs taking too long? Are you feeling overwhelmed by the thought of managing your iSeries all on your own? Wouldn't it be great if you could talk to the performance experts and have them assess your situation?

There is a feature within Job Watcher called Situational Analysis. This is an optional part of the Job Watcher summary program that is only available in Job Watcher (IBM i 5.4 and higher). The function identifies potential problem jobs found in the collection and highlights these areas of concern. This optional summary part is built on years of knowledge and historical data from IBM performance experts. Now you can utilize this feature and start taking charge of your situation.  

To use Situational Analysis, right-click on the desired collection object within Job Watcher. Then select Summarize (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Select a collection object to summarize. (Click images to enlarge.)

The Summarize Collection(s) window is displayed as shown in Figure 2. Check the boxes as shown. Checking the box titled "Submit the summary to batch job QIDRJWSUM instead of using a QZDASOINIT job" makes it easier to identify your job, especially if you have a large number of QZDASOINIT jobs already running on your system.

Figure 2: Select the boxes as shown.

Once you click on OK, you will see the following window displayed, indicating a batch job has been submitted (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Your batch job has been submitted!

If you click on Preferences prior to clicking on OK (Figure 2), you can customize which situations should be executed and change any of the filter values used for each of the different situations. For example, instead of using the default value of 3 milliseconds for the "High synchronous write response time" situation, you could change this to something that would be more relevant for your environment or for a particular problem you may be investigating. If you're new to Situational Analysis and want an overall picture of what's happening on your system, you may just want to let the summary function execute all of the situations until you become more knowledgeable about which situations are most relevant to your specific environment (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Let the summary function execute all situations. 

After the summary job completes, you can view the Collection overview time signature graph. If your system is running well, you may not see any see situations or only a very few. If your system is running poorly, you may see multiple situations within the same time interval and your graph may look very red. If this occurs, you can double-click the desired bar and look at the Situations tab. Each situation is a different background color. Flyovers on the overview graphs indicate jobs of interest (Figure 5).  

Figure 5: The Collection overview time signature graph tells you whether your system is running well or poorly.

Properties for a collection that has been summarized will have a Situations tab. This tab shows the situations defined and also includes a count of the total situations that occurred in this collection for each type. By looking at the Total column, you can get a good idea where to place your focus (Figure 6).  

Figure 6: The Situations tab can help you determine what to focus on.

In this article, we examined how to use the Situational Analysis function within Job Watcher and how it can help you analyze your iSeries performance more effectively. Now you can begin to take charge of your situation.