Custom queries

You can use custom queries to reduce network traffic and processing cycles on the IBM® Tivoli® Enterprise Monitoring Agent and IBM Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Server.

When you use custom queries, you can:

• Reduce memory usage on the IBM Enterprise Portal Server and client
• Limit the number of rows and columns passed from the agent to the IBM Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Server

For example, you should use the Dataset Attribute Database feature to write a query that targets data sets on a specific control unit. Furthermore, you should refine your query so that it retrieves only monitoring information about space utilization. You can substantially reduce the amount of data that the query returns and reduce demand on system resources:

• By limiting the query to the specific control unit
• By specifying the attribute that you want to monitor

It is more efficient to use custom queries than it is to use View filters to filter data. View filters do not reduce demand on system resources. In fact, IBM Enterprise Portal requires more processor resources when you use View filters. The client applies filters to the current page. If a query returns more than one page, only a subset of the data is viewed on each page. IBM Enterprise Portal provides users with an option to increase the size of pages. When you select this option, more filtered data is displayed on each page. The memory requirements for the client increases, because the data that the query retrieves is stored in larger pages.