Analyzing message flow performance

Measures of performance typically include product speed in terms of processing rate and response times, and resource usage in terms of the CPU and memory consumed. In order to assess the performance of an application, metrics are used to compare the actual performance with the required or expected performance, using measures such as the number of messages per second, elapsed time, CPU utilization, or CPU cost per message. You can use the message flow statistics and accounting data to assess the performance of your message flows and applications using some of these metrics, and to identify the message flows and nodes that might benefit from tuning to improve performance.

Message flow statistics for subflows are accumulated in the metrics for the top-level parent flow. For example, if a subflow contains an Input node, the number of message flow threads and any node-level additional instances from the subflow will be reported in the NumberOfThreadsInPool property of the statistics for the parent flow.

You can start and stop the collection of statistics data by using the web user interface, the IBM® Integration Explorer, or the command line. You can also view the collected statistics in tabular or graphical form by using the web user interface or the IBM Integration Explorer.

The following topics describe the tasks that you can complete to control the collection of message flow accounting and statistics data by using the command line:

• Starting collection of message flow accounting and statistics data with the mqsichangeflowstats command
• Stopping collection of message flow accounting and statistics data with the mqsichangeflowstats command
• Viewing message flow accounting and statistics data collection parameters
• Modifying message flow accounting and statistics data collection parameters
• Resetting message flow accounting and statistics archive data

These topics show examples of how to issue the accounting and statistics commands. The examples for z/OS® are shown for SDSF; if you are using another interface, you must modify the example shown according to the requirements of that interface. For details of other z/OS options, see Issuing commands to the z/OS console.

For information about how to improve the performance of your message flows, see Tuning message flow performance.

For troubleshooting information that includes guidance on dealing with performance issues, see Troubleshooting performance problems.

The following topics contain reference information that you might find helpful when analyzing the performance of your message flows:

• Message flow accounting and statistics details
• Message flow accounting and statistics output formats
• Example message flow accounting and statistics data
• Metrics for accounting and statistics data in the IBM Integration Explorer