Aloha

Usually I try to post at least a couple items a week, even when I'm out on vacation. However, last week I was on vacation on the Big Island of Hawaii (near Kona), and what can I say? Here's a picture of where I held office hours last week.

I will be at the Share conference in Anaheim this week. I will be doing a series of presentations on monitoring and performance management, and attending sessions. I'm sure I will come up with quite a few nuggets of relevant information for the blog, so please stay tuned.

OMEGAMON XE For DB2 PE And Extended Insight

I've posted several times on new features in OMEGAMON XE for DB2 V5.10. But, I think that's for good reason, there is quite a bit of new feature/function contained within this new release.

Probably one of the most interesting new features added to OMEGAMON XE For DB2 PE (important note - this is relevant for PE only, it's not in PM) is a feature called Extended Insight. Extended Insight provides something that many users ask for often; getting an analysis of DB2 distributed queries that will break out the host time versus the network time. Extended Insight helps to answer a key question: is the problem on the host and the SQL query, or is the problem in the network?

The nice thing about Extended Insight is it can be referenced interactively within the Tivoli Enterprise Portal. When you are in a thread view you can drill down and get the relevant Extended Insight performance stats. In the screen shot I show here, you can see an example of the navigation. Another interesting thing about Extended Insight is it allows OMEGAMON DB2 to provide information that integrates nicely with ITCAM displays, and provides drill down detail of SQL level activity within ITCAM.

Again, please note that Extended Insight is only available with OMEGAMON XE For DB2 Performance Expert (PE), and is not in OMEGAMON For DB2 PM. So if you are a PM customer and want the feature, you may need to upgrade to PE. If in doubt, contact your IBM rep. I'm sure they will be happy to help you out.

Some recent and upcoming events of interest

Here are a few Tivoli z webcast events you might find of interest.

Tivoli for zEnterprise – Why integrated service management matters

Join us for this complimentary webcast and learn how Tivoli products can help you prepare for a better way of integrating service management under the new IBM zEnterprise “system of systems” and manage your data center as one. The speaker is Fillmore Bowen.

Here's a link to register:

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/sw-events/webcast/U074717Q21914I24.html

zSecure V1.12 helps consolidate security management

Learn about the new capabilities in Security zSecure suite V1.12 that enhance mainframe security on the consolidated zEnterprise platform.

Here's a link to register:

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/os/systemz/webcast/jan20/index.html?S_TACT=110GU00M&S_CMP=twr

Better manage IT costs with Tivoli Asset and Financial Management for zEnterprise

Learn how Tivoli Asset and Financial Management for zEnterprise can help IT organizations more responsibly manage their entire asset lifecycles, optimize software spending and improve audit-readiness. The speaker is Sig Puchaz.

Here's the link:

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/sw-events/webcast/G509526H80465Q34.html

All these events are free, and you can download them after the fact even though the live event may have already occurred.

More on OMEGAMON DB2 V5.10

There's a lot of new stuff in OMEGAMON XE For DB2 V5.10. Another interesting nugget is Near Term History support for zIIP processors. This can be useful because collecting Near Term History data is one of the more costly functions of OMEGAMON DB2.

The cost of Near Term History collection in OMEGAMON can vary. It has the potential to be costly primarily because it has the potential to collect and store a considerable amount of data. In some shops it may be as much as millions of records of information per day.

What V5.10 provides is support for zIIP processor utilization by the tasks that write Near term History. The OMEGAMON DB2 zIIP support requires no special configuration options for the zIIP processor, and requires no special configuration or setup in WLM. Essentially what happens is, if a zIIP is available, OMEGAMON DB2 has the option of using, if appropriate.

zIIP support is a good way to offload some of the cost of DB2 historical data collection.

New capabilities in OMEGAMON DB2 V510

–OMEGAMON DB2 V5.10 is a robust new release. You should be interested in V5.10, especially if you are looking at going to DB2 for z/OS Version 10.

DB2 Version 10 offers quite a few new monitoring and metric capabilities. DB2 10 improves the support for monitoring and managing both static and dynamic SQL. A unique statement execution identifier (that I mentioned in a prior post) is introduced. Statement type and statement execution identifier are externalized that can be used to correlate statement execution on the server with the client application.

ØDB2 V10 provides updated IFCIDs related to SQL execution, and new Static SQL Statement Cache trace information (flag IFCID 400, comparable to IFCID 318 for dynamic SQL).

Here is an example of the kind of information you can now get in OMEGAMOn DB2 V5.10. Note that the information looks similar to what you could get before for dynamic SQL, but now we can get similar information for Static SQL. Look closely at the example, and you will see what I mean.

New stuff in OMEGAMON XE For DB2 V5.10

A new version of OMEGAMON is always an exciting event (for me anyways). The newest release of OMEGAMON DB2, V5.10, is no different. OMEGAMON DB2 V5.10 was made generally available last year to coincide with the release of DB2 Version 10. One of the things that V5.10 does well is exploit many of the new instrumentation features of Version 10 of DB2 on z/OS.

DB2 Version 10, like most new DB2 versions, provides more traces, more trace granularity and detail, and more collection/analysis options. This includes new trace IFCIDs, and more information added to existing IFCIDs. Some of the most interesting stuff revolves the notion of a statement ID. Statement ID is a unique counter used to identify a statement, and its usage, across a DB2 system. It allows for more granularity of performance information at the statement level.

OMEGAMON DB2 V5.10 provides support for statement ID information in several ways, including both the Tivoli Portal and Classic 3270 interface. This information can be shown for both dynamic as well as for static SQL calls. It looks like very useful information, and I plan to do some additional posts on this, and in general on OMEGAMON DB2 V5.10.