Importing performance data

When an application performance problem is occurring in a production environment, you can import performance data from Tivoli® Monitoring for Transaction Performance (TMTP), IBM® Tivoli Composite Application Manager for WebSphere® (ITCAM for WebSphere), or IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for Response Time Tracking (ITCAM for RTT) and analyze it to identify where the problem is occurring.

Prerequisites:

To import data :

  1. From the File menu, select Import. Select Tivoli Performance data. Click Next.
  2. Specify the Host of the TEMS. If you use a user ID and password to log on, type them into the User and Password fields.
  3. If the server is configured to use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), enable the Requires SSL security check box.
  4. The ports are used to transmit the data. If you select Use default Web service port, it will use the default ports, 9081 without security or 9446 with SSL. If the administrator has configured these differently, select the Use port option and specify the port that the administrator has configured. Click Next.
  5. Specify the time period for which to import data.

    When specifying the time in a specific number of units, note that for consistency, "month" is defined as 30 days and "year" is defined as 365 days. "Days" refers to 24 hour periods, not calendar days. The units of time selected are subtracted from the time that you click Finish to import the data to give the start time. For example, if you select 2 months, the time period will be the 60 days (24 hour time periods) immediately prior to you clicking Finish.

  6. Specify the type of data that you want to import. For detailed analysis, you will likely want to choose Import detailed instance-level data, although it may involve a large quantity of data. If you select Import aggregated statistics, the data imported will be statistical summaries, and not the kind of data that can be analyzed in sequence diagrams or trace tools.Note: TMTP must be configured to record instance-level data in order for you to import it. If TMTP is configured to collect only aggregated data, regardless of what you select here, only aggregated statistical data will be available in the TMTP database. ITCAM WebSphere does not collect aggregated statistics. If aggregated data collection is specified with ITCAM WebSphere, the import will fail. Click Finish to continue.
  7. Select the Policies or Traps from which you want to import data. Usually, you will import from policies or traps that have more severe problem status (such as critical or failure) because they will point you to the code problems. Selecting only the most serious policies or traps helps limit the quantity of data imported. Click the Status column heading to sort the policies according to severity. Click Next. Note: Policies are used by TMTP and ITCAM for RTT. Traps are used by ITCAM for WebSphere.
  8. The policies or traps that you selected are associated with a group of hosts (machines) in the application system. Select the hosts whose data you are interested in seeing (usually the hosts with the more critical status). Specifying a subset of hosts will again reduce the quantity of data imported, helping you focus on where the problems really are. Click Finish. Note: When importing data from ITCAM for WebSphere, the WAS node name is listed, as opposed to the real host name. This is set by the WAS administrator and does not necessarily have to be related to the actual host name, though that is the default choice.
  9. If you selected to import instance-level data, you can select the transactions for which you are interested in seeing data. The Time column indicates when the transaction started, and the Duration column indicates how long the transaction took. You can sort the data by clicking on any of the column headings. Click Next. Note: The transaction patterns listed are not the actual URL of the transaction, but rather a regular expression pattern match for the URL that it matched in TMTP.
  10. Next, indicate the workspace location for storing the imported data by specifying the Profiling project and Monitor names.
  11. Click Finish to import the data.

If for some reason communication is very slow, you may get a timeout message. You can change the communication timeout setting in the Preferences dialog; from the Window menu, select Preferences > Profiling and Logging > Importing, and change the number of seconds for the import timeout setting.

TMTP import note

When importing, you might receive the following error message:

IWAY0161E Unable to connect to the TMTP management server. Please ensure that the correct host name was entered, the server is running, and there are no firewalls blocking the specified port.

Also, the log (in <workspace>/.metadata/.log) would the following exception:

java.net.SocketException: Operation timed out: connect:could be due to invalid address

The problem may be caused by you or the TMTP management server being behind a firewall. Check that you have set the host name and port correctly in the Import wizard. If these values are correct, then you should contact a system administrator to see if your firewall issue can be resolved. The port that you need to be able to connect to on the host running the TMTP management server was configured at the time the management server was installed. By default, the ports are 9081 for regular communication, and 9446 SSL enabled communication. (These are the ports used when you select the Use default TMTP Web services port option.)

Once you have collected the performance data, you can begin analyzing it and diagnosing the problem. You can view the data using several views including statistics views and sequence diagrams of class and object interactions, to help find the root cause of the performance problem.

ITCAM for WebSphere import notes

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