Obtaining advice from the advisors

Advisors provide a variety of recommendations that help improve the performance of your application server.

Before you begin

The advisors provide helpful performance as well as diagnostic advice about the state of the application server.

About this task

Tuning WebSphere® Application Server is a critical part of getting the best performance from your website. However, tuning WebSphere Application Server involves analyzing performance data and determining the optimal server configuration. This determination requires considerable knowledge about the various components in the application server and their performance characteristics. The performance advisors encapsulate this knowledge, analyze the performance data, and provide configuration recommendations to improve the application server performance. Therefore, the performance advisors provide a starting point to the application server tuning process and help you without requiring that you become an expert.

The Runtime Performance Advisor is extended to also provide diagnostic advice and is now called the Performance and Diagnostic Advisor. Diagnostic advice provides useful information regarding the state of the application server. Diagnostic advice is especially useful when an application is not functioning as expected, or simply as a means of monitoring the health of application server.

Procedure

  • Decide which performance advisor is correct for the purpose, Performance and Diagnostic Advisor or Tivoli® Performance Viewer advisor.
  • Use the chosen advisor to periodically check for inefficient settings, and to view recommendations.
  • Analyze Performance Monitoring Infrastructure data with performance advisors.
[IBM i]

What to do next

Additionally, you can use the heap monitor feature to monitor the Java™ Virtual Machine (JVM) heap size of a WebSphere Application Server profile in comparison to pool size. The feature is available for new WebSphere Application Server profiles or profiles that are created after you update to the WebSphere Application Server. For existing WebSphere Application Server profiles, there is a script available to add the feature. See the heapMonitor script information.