Collecting report data with the ISPF Online Monitor

You can use the ISPF Online Monitor to write performance data to a data set that is to be used as input for reports. This can be useful when you want to avoid flooding SMF (System Management Facility) with large numbers of Db2 trace records, and make Db2 trace data immediately available without affecting SMF or GTF record collection.

To collect data, you require the necessary Db2 authority to start and stop Db2 traces.

To collect performance data, you first configure a collect task. In each collect task, you specify the type of data that you want to gather, the trace start and stop criteria, and the output data set name. When you have configured and started a task, it triggers the appropriate Db2 traces to start and stop when the trace start and stop criteria have been met, and writes the collected data to the output data set.

You can configure and start up to four independent collect tasks. With each task you can collect trace data for:
  • One or more reports sets
  • Specific types of reports or traces within a report set
  • Specific IFCIDs
In addition, you can limit the data to specific:
  • Locations
  • Plan names
  • Authorization IDs
You can configure Db2 traces to start:
  • At a specified time of the day
  • When a specified periodic exception is detected
  • When a specified exception event occurs
  • Immediately
You can stop Db2 traces manually or configure traces to stop:
  • After a specified elapsed time
  • After a specified number of trace records have been collected
  • After a thread has been terminated or reused
  • After a particular IFCID has been collected a specified number of times