Using Alerts

The Alerts view provides details of statistical and performance alerts that have been captured by PA and loaded into DB2®. Using alerts you can manage and view single transactions, for example, on a day to day basis. If you want to view data trends in your system over a specified period of time, you can view them in reports. See Using reports for more information.

Viewing alert details

Click the Alerts tab The Alerts tab. All alerts that have occurred on the host are displayed. You can reduce the scope by using the Date-Time selection dialog. See the Selecting and viewing data topic for more information. To view the details for a specific alert, either double-click it or right-click it and select Alert detail from the context menu:
The alerts context sensitive menu

Details of the record that triggered the alert are displayed in a new tab in the sheet view.

Selecting which type of alerts to display

Alerts are listed in three categories:
  • Critical
  • Warning
  • Information
You can also display alerts that occurred on either the CICS Transaction Server or CICS Transaction Gateway host databases.

You can choose which alerts to display by clicking the view menu The View menu icon and selecting the types of alerts that you are interested in:

The alerts filter menu

Viewing statistics that caused an alert

Right-click the alert and select Run using... from the context menu. The Extract from Transaction Classes records dialog displays:

The Extraction dialog

Note: The heading of this dialog changes depending on the type of statistic that caused the alert.

You can use this dialog to view statistic records that caused an alert, and the circumstances that caused the alert. For example, you can change the dates and other parameters in this dialog to get statistics records before an alert occurred, or compare against another statistic.

For example, if there is an alert that is configured to action if the number of threads is 80, when the alert occurred you might want to see what the threads level was 10 minutes before. Another example, if you have two systems that are working in parallel and one causes an alert you might want to see what the corresponding statistic is on the other system (APPLID). You might then decide that you need to balance the systems better as a result

The date and time context options follow these rules:
  • Either From or To can be omitted to indicate that the range is open-ended.
  • If From is omitted, it defaults to the first input record.
  • If To is omitted, it defaults to the end of the file.
  • If the From date is specified with no time, the start of day is assumed.
  • If the To date is specified with no time, the end of day is assumed.
For a time slot, both times must be present with no dates to signify the same time slot every day. The times can span midnight.

Viewing alerts from a specific date and time

Click the Date dialog arrow date dialog on the toolbar to display the date context menu.

date context menu
Select Date-time selection to specify a particular date and time. See Selecting and viewing data for more information about this dialog.

You can also use the Date-time selection context menu to display records from a wider time period. For example, if you select yesterday, all alerts that occurred in the last 24 hours are displayed, relative to the current day. If you select week, all alerts that occurred in the last seven days exactly are displayed.

Hiding alerts

You can hide an alert by right-clicking it and selecting Hide alert. The alert is hidden from view in the CICS PA perspective and the local copy is deleted from the cache. The alert is still on your host database which has a full dataset available (containing other alerts that you might have hidden). If you want to permanently delete an alert you must delete in on the host. To view hidden alerts again click the refresh button The refresh button to refresh the alerts view.