Monitor metrics

To effectively monitor system performance, you must decide which aspects of system performance you want to monitor. Management Central offers a variety of performance measurements, known as metrics, to help you pinpoint different aspects of system performance.

The Metrics page in the New Monitor window allows you to view and change the metrics that you want to monitor. To access this page, select Monitors, right-click System, and then select New Monitor. Fill in the required fields, and then click the Metrics tab.

When you configure a monitor, you can use any metric, a group of metrics, or all the metrics from the list to be included in your monitor. Metric types you can use in your monitor include the following:

Metric groups: Metric description:
CPU Utilization The percentage of available processing unit time consumed by jobs on your system. Choose from the following types of CPU Utilization metrics for use in your monitors:
  • CPU Utilization (Average)
  • CPU Utilization (Interactive Jobs)
  • CPU Utilization (Interactive Feature)
  • CPU Utilization (Database Capability)
  • CPU Utilization (Secondary Workloads)
  • CPU Utilization Basic (Average)
To learn more about these metrics and how to use them, see the online help available on the General tab of the New Monitor window or the Monitor Properties window in iSeries™ Navigator.
 
Interactive Response Time (Average and Maximum) The response time that interactive jobs experience on your system.
 
Transaction Rate (Average) The number of transactions per second completed by all jobs on your system.
 
Transaction Rate (Interactive) The number of transactions per second completed on your system by the following types of jobs:
  • Interactive
  • Multiple requester terminal (MRT)
  • System/36™ environment interactive
  • Pass-through
 
Batch Logical Database I/O The average number of logical database input/output (I/O) operations currently performed by batch jobs on the system.
 
Disk Arm Utilization (Average and Maximum) The percentage of disk arm capacity currently used on your system during the time you collect the data.
 
Disk Storage (Average and Maximum) The percentage of disk arm storage that is full on your system during the time you collect the data.
 
Disk IOP Utilization (Average and Maximum) How busy the disk input/output processors (IOPs) are on your system during the time you collect the data.
 
Communications IOP Utilization (Maximum and Average) How busy the communications input/output processors (IOPs) are on your system during the time you collect the data.
 
Communications Line Utilization (Average and Maximum) The amount of data that was actually sent and received on all your system communication lines.
 
LAN Utilization (Maximum and Average) The amount of data that was actually sent and received on all your local area network (LAN) communication lines.
 
Machine Pool Faults The number of faults per second occurring in the machine pool on the system.
 
User Pool Faults (Maximum and Average) The number of faults per second occurring in all of the user pools on the system.

If you need more help, click the Help button on the New Monitor-Metrics window. Once you become familiar with the Management Central metrics, which metrics you select will depend on the information needs of your computing environment. After you have selected metrics that target the information you are trying to see, you are ready to view and change detailed metric information for each metric you selected for your monitor.

Related concepts
Identify and resolve common performance problems