Performance Management Guide

Using the Performance Toolbox

The Performance Toolbox (PTX) is a licensed product that allows graphical display of a variety of performance-related metrics. Among the advantages of PTX over ASCII reporting programs is that it is much easier to check current performance with a glance at the graphics monitor than by looking at a screen full of numbers. PTX also facilitates the combination of information from multiple performance-related commands and allows recording and playback.

PTX contains tools for local and remote system-activity monitoring and tuning. The product consists of two main components: the PTX Manager and the PTX Agent. The PTX Agent is available as a separate licensed product called the Performance Aide for AIX. The following figure shows a simplified LAN configuration in which the PTX Manager is monitoring the activity of several systems.

Figure 16. LAN Configuration Using Performance Toolbox. This illustration shows five nodes of a local area network that are connected using the star topology. Each node on the network has the performance toolbox (PTX) agent running on it. One of the nodes is the PTX Manager and can monitor the other nodes via the resident agent.

The main purpose of the PTX Manager is to collect and display data from the various systems in the configuration. The primary program for this purpose is xmperf. The primary program used by the Agent to collect and transmit data to the Manager is xmservd.

PTX is described in detail in the Performance Toolbox Version 2 and 3 for AIX: Guide and Reference and Customizing Performance Toolbox and Performance Toolbox Extensions for AIX.

Recording with the Performance Agent

If you need to record information or a playback facility, several tools are included with the manager code (xmperf, 3dmon, azizo, ptxrlog). Other tools (xmservd, ptxtab, ptxsplit) are packaged with the agent code.

Best suited for continuous monitoring are the following tools:

• The ptxrlog command can produce recordings in ASCII format, which allows you to print the output or post-process it, or it can produce a recording file in binary to be viewed with the azizo or xmperf commands.
• The xmservd daemon can act as a recording facility and is controlled through the xmservd.cf configuration file. This daemon can simultaneously provide near real-time network-based data monitoring and local recording on a given node.
• The xmtrend daemon, much like xmservd, acts as a recording facility. The main difference is in the storage requirements for each daemon. Typical xmservd recordings can consume several megabytes of disk storage every hour. The xmtrend agent was created to focus on providing manageable 24 x 7 long-term recordings of large metric sets.
• The jazizo tool is a Java version that replaces azizo. Jazizo is a tool for analyzing the long-term performance characteristics of a system. It analyzes recordings created by the xmtrend daemon, and provides displays of the recorded data that can be customized.
• The wlmperf tools provide graphical views of Workload Manager (WLM) resource activities by class. This tool can generate reports from trend recordings made by the PTX daemons covering minutes, hours, days, weeks, or monthly periods.