VISUAL Message Center:
iSeries Performance Agent

Today workloads are critical, complex, and less predictable. Users are more demanding. But achieving great system performance is easier than ever!

Identify performance bottlenecks — easily

The iSeries Performance Agent gives you real time performance monitoring of one or multiple iSeries servers or partitions, with practically no overhead. No more guessing — see exactly what is happening, right at the very second.

Performance Expertise in a Box

It comes with a predefined set of gauges and alerts so you can start monitoring critical metrics (Vital Data) out of the box, no matter what your level of performance expertise. It even gives you detailed explanations of alerts, including technical impact and proposed solutions.

Take Corrective Action Before Business is Affected

Abusive users, full disks, interactive thresholds, memory faults… no matter the cause you will receive prompt notice of deviations and potential problems. Take action manually or automatically to correct the causes so your end users are not affected.

Get Alerted Immediately to Potential Problems — and Solve Them!

Ensure Service Level Agreements (SLA)

Make sure you are complying with your service standards. Discover reasons for potential slowdowns before they are a real problem.

Avoid CFINT

End users using more interactive power than the installed interactive feature can severely impact performance. Not any more! Thanks to iSeries Performance Agent, abuses can be detected early and corrective action taken before the OS/400 CPU-hungry CFINT task is triggered.

No Noticeable Overhead — Guaranteed!

As a result of our continuous collaboration with IBM Rochester, performance collection algorithms are lightning fast — near zero CPU used. Compare this with any competing product!

"Real" (Zero Delay) Real Time Monitoring

Several products promise real time monitoring, but collection intervals are usually minutes. Performance Agent, on the contrary, can retrieve data at customizable intervals (from hours to near zero seconds). For instance, you can take snapshots for very small intervals and find resource abuses before they are averaged into a long period — where they can be very difficult to spot.

Analyze Historical Information

Includes Graphical Analyzer, a utility to graph and correlate vital performance metrics easily — and see trends and bottleneck causes historically.

Justify Upgrades

Running out of resources? Performance Agent can detect what your needs are, and create convincing graphs to show to upper management.

Integration with SmartConsole

You may use the iSeries Performance Agent Control Panel standalone, or set it to send all the Performance alerts to your VISUAL Message Center central console. There you can use the full power of the SmartConsole for managing the alerts.

New: VISUAL Control Performance Planner Add-On

Historical performance analysis tool for iSeries problem identification, growth management, and capacity planning.

See up to three years of performance data in easy-to-understand graphs
Know when you need to upgrade
Try out possible configurations
Upgrade with confidence and concrete justification

VISUAL Control Performance Planner provides intuitive graph generation for analyzing and forecasting systems performance and utilization. It is the best tool on the market for:

Performance Problem Determination

Systems histories, detailed drill down to systems status, active jobs, disk status, users, identify the root of any performance problem.

Growth Management and Trending

CPU /Disk space use by date, before and after graphs, projected trends, automated periodic reports, job/user group summaries.

Capacity Planning

Modeling projected workloads, server consolidation, upgrades, DASD.

The graphical interface is highly intuitive and makes a perfect complement to the real-time performance monitoring and management features of VISUAL Control Center. It gives instant access to up to three years of detailed systems performance data, and accurately describes trends and predicts your future systems needs based on past performance. It also allows you to make hypothetical projections using different hardware configurations, allowing you to budget and upgrade with confidence based on detailed analytical reports:

Generate over 100 easy-to-understand graphs of systems performance using key performance metrics:
- CPU
- I/O
- Disk
- Memory
- Response Times
- Subsystems
- Transaction
- Jobs
- Pages Spooled
Track and trend workloads, users, jobs, devices
Test possible LPAR, DASD, Server Consolidation and upgrade configurations
Upgrade with confidence and simple justification graphs

Your Personal OS/400 "Cockpit"

Discover what is really going on at one or multiple systems with ease — thanks to customizable, colorful real time graphs. Spot abusive tasks, check PTF freshness, UPS status, resource-hogging jobs, and more.

Ensure SLAs — and Proudly Prove It to Managers

Create charts that prove you are in compliance. See SLA violations early and discover the causes in real time. Set customized thresholds per system or partition, or according to date/time, and escalate messages easily.

Navigate Historical Data

Analyze trends and correlate metrics. Drill from yearly graphs down to hourly intervals with point and click simplicity.

Technical Overview

Predefined Control Panel — Install and Play!

Provides you with the most important indicators of system activity right out of the box, including: CPU usage data: % used by job type, Top 10 CPU abusive users, Top 10 CPU abusive jobs; disk/ASP usage; response times; jobs (per job type, user, subsystem and job queues, output queues); extensive memory pools data; communication lines, and much more.

Exclusive Vital Data Collection

Provides extensive Vital Data not commonly available in other products, including:

CPU usage grouped by user (top 10)
SLA checking (number of interactive response times per interaction time)
Maximum, minimum, and average response times
Top three maximum and minimum response time jobs
CPU usage per subsystem
CPU and response times per pool
Memory per job
Memory per activity level
IPL, security level, system capacity, PTF information, etc.
And more!

User Defined Data Collection

Open architecture that allows for inclusion of end-user data both at the Windows or iSeries level (like Web hits, Windows disk usage), or select from an extensive list of available performance metrics (including IOP usage, disk arm occupation, network adapter usage, and more).

Multiple System Support

See several systems or partitions at once, using the predefined multisystem graphs or by opening several resizable Control Panels at once. Set different thresholds and actions for each system if needed.

Flexible Alert Conditions

Check for simple or complex conditions, including calendar conditions, logical operations, regular expressions, and more, with no scripting or programming required. For instance, if (&CPU_TOPJOB > 50%) AND (&JOBNAME <> 'INVOICE') then reduce the priority of &JOBNAME to 60, unless today is a non working day or it is not peak hours.

Execute Commands

Automatically solve problems by executing OS/400 commands at local or remote systems. Use variables like job name, user name, system name, etc. in these commands. Alter job attributes according to job behavior, avoid CFINT triggering, collect information of an abusive task, etc.

Get the Message

Be notified by a sound, a pop up window, email, cell phone, etc. Escalate alerts to the operator on duty with guaranteed notification for urgent alarms.

Flexible, Smart Alert Management

Get alerted only once (not many) for a policy violation. Get an alert only when a performance threshold is exceeded a certain number of times in an interval (not just the first time it is exceeded).

Record Now — Replay Later

Capture system usage snapshots continuously or only when an alert is triggered, so you can analyze the problem later, or send the data to another person for advice.

Integration with Support Agent

Drill down to the end user jobs that are abusing resources — their actual screens, internal data, even the running source code is only a couple of clicks away.

Integration with Performance Manager

Upgradable to VISUAL Control Center (Performance Manager), which provides total resource management by customizable policies. Automate memory tuning, distribute resources among partitions, avoid abusive jobs, and exploit your hardware at the fullest extent; achieving better performance, ensuring SLAs, and happier end users.

Internet-Enabled

Monitor your iSeries locally or remotely, even from home.

VISUAL Message Center Agents/Modules
Smart Console	Centralizes the collection and management of information from all networked servers and agents
Notifier	Ensure high system availability with two-way SMS messaging and escalation lists
iSeries Server Agent	Collects and manages batch messages from any iSeries message queue (e.g., QSYSOPR). Monitors job activity and status, job queues, devices, history log (QHST)
Server Agent for Windows^®	Collects and manages application, system and security events from any Windows server (NT, 2000, XP)
iSeries Interactive Agent	Collects and manages all interactive iSeries user error messages
iSeries Performance Agent	Collects and manages critical performance parameters from iSeries servers. Includes powerful graphical console
iSeries Security Agent	Detects and audits possible threats to system and data integrity
iSeries Support Agent	Remote problem diagnosis tool for operators. Provides unique capabilities for resolving problems in production processes
TCP/IP Services Agent	Monitors availability and performance of any networked TCP/IP service, including POP3 email, SMTP, FTP more. Includes graphical Java console
Reporting System	Create over 40 graphical historical reports of your systems direct from the Smart Console. Reports on performance, events, systems usage, security, errors, users, and more.