Why use Tivoli Performance Viewer?
The Tivoli Performance Viewer (TPV) enables administrators and programmers to monitor the overall health of WebSphere Application Server without leaving the administrative console. In V4.0, Tivoli Performance Viewer was originally named the Resource Analyzer.
From TPV, one 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 servlet response time
In addition to providing a built in viewer for PMI, TPV also allows you to view data for other products or customer applications that implement custom PMI. For more information on custom PMI, refer to Enabling PMI data collection.
By providing the ability to look at this data, administrators can determine which part of the application to focus on to improve performance and what configuration settings to change to improve performance. For example, in order to determine what part of the application to focus on, one can view the summary charts for servlets, enterprise beans and EJB methods, and sort these tables to determine which of these resources has the highest response time. We can then focus on improving the code path for those application resources taking the longest response time.
Likewise, one can look at the Tivoli Performance Viewer to help manage configuration settings through viewing the various graphs or using the Tivoli Performance Advisor. For example, by looking at the summary chart for thread pools, one can determine whether the thread pools need to be increased or decreased in size by monitoring the percent (%) usage. After configuration settings are changed based on that data, one can look at these views to determine the effectiveness of the changes. To help with configuration settings, the Tivoli Performance Viewer also provides an Advisor. The Advisor looks at various data while your application is running and provides advice on WebSphere configuration settings to change for improved performance.
TPV topologies and performance impacts
The following two topologies exist for the Tivoli Performance Viewer:
- Tivoli Performance Viewer running in a single server environment
- Tivoli Performance Viewer running in a Network Deployment environment
When the Tivoli Performance Viewer is running in a single server environment, the collection and viewing of the data occurs in the same Java virtual machine. Because the collection and viewing of data occurs in the application server, performance is affected by the various user and logging settings. Using the Tivoli Performance Viewer describes the user and logging settings and their effect on performance.
When the Tivoli Performance Viewer is running in a Network Deployment environment, the data is collected at each of the nodes and stored in memory at the node agent. Data is then viewed from the deployment manager. This architecture enables the monitoring work to be distributed among the nodes. Similar to the single server environment, the various user and logging settings directly influence the extent to which performance is affected.
Related Tasks
Monitoring performance with Tivoli Performance Viewer (TPV)