OMEGAMON DB2 Near Term History

OMEGAMON DB2 has a very useful Near Term History (NTH) function. NTH provides an easy way to be able to retrieve and review DB2 Accounting and Statistics records from the past few hours of DB2 processing. The data is stored in a set of VSAM files allocated to the OMEGAMON collection task. How far back the history goes depends upon the size of the files and the amount of data being written to these files. Now some of the data volume is driven by the DB2 workload activity. Accounting records are typically written when a DB2 thread terminates processing, and it is the Accounting data that is often looked at by the analyst when studying what DB2 applications have been doing. Statistics records are created on a time interval basis. Usually, you will have much more accounting data than statistics data. Also, OMEGAMON has the ability to pull in additional trace IFCIDs to get information on things such as dynamic SQL activity.

To understand the amount of data being gathered by NTH, there are displays that show the number of records written to the NTH files, by type. In the example I show, you see an example of common NTH settings/options, and then you see the record count in the NTH record information display. If you look carefully you see that 'Perf-Dyn SQL' has a lot of records written relative to the other record types. This is a good way to understand the impact of enabling certain collection options, such as dynamic SQL collection, and see how many trace records are being gathered, as a result.