Using performance counters

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Performance counters provide an in depth monitoring of the system, recording the details about the Content Collector processing progress, such as the number of documents accessed, the number of documents submitted for processing, and the number of unique and duplicate document instances.

About this task

IBM® Content Collector provides a variety of performance counters that can be used to monitor what the system is doing. Refer to the table of IBM Content Collector performance counters for more information about which counters are available.

If all you want is a quick insight to the health of your Content Collector system without having to configure a profiling tool, use the Content Collector system dashboard. It uses a subset of the available Content Collector counters.

If there are other performance counters that you want to monitor that are not included in the system dashboard, there are various tools that you can use to monitor these counters, for example the Microsoft Windows performance monitor or IBM Systems Director.
Tip: On 64-bit versions of Windows Server, you should use the 32-bit version of the performance monitor. You can start it with the command mmc /32 perfmon.msc. The Performance Logs and Alerts service must be active. On Windows Server version 2008 you must ensure that the Performance Counter DLL Host Service is also running.

On Windows Server 2008 (32-bit) and 2008 R2 (64-bit), however, monitoring the IBM Content Collector performance counters might not work as expected. See the topic about limitations when monitoring performance counters on Windows Server 2008 systems.

To add performance counters to the performance monitor that comes with Windows:

Procedure

  1. Run perfmon.exe.
    This will open the Windows performance monitoring utility.
  2. Right-click in the graph area and select Add Counters.
  3. Select the Performance object to which the counter that you want to add belongs, for example CTMS Collector.
  4. Select which counters you want to add.
    • Select All counters to monitor all counters.
    • Select Select counters from list to monitor only the counters that you select.
  5. In the Instances list, select the instance for which you want to monitor the counts.
    An instance can be a task route or a collector, for example.
    Note: There are instance counters and instanceless counters. In Windows performance monitor, you cannot monitor instance performance counters if there is no instance. This means that you cannot add these counters until IBM Content Collector has been started and the counters have been instantiated. For example, you cannot configure the tool to monitor the counter Documents Created before a document has been created. You can work around this problem by either using another tool to monitor counters or by completing the following steps:
    1. Save the current set of counters.
      Right-click in the graph area and select Save as to save the counter set in an HTML file.
    2. Open the HTML file in a text editor and manually add the instance counters that you want to monitor.
  6. Click Add.
    The graph begins updating every couple of seconds to show the current counts.