Features
The key features vary by offering. Some features are available in all offerings and others are available in selected offerings.
In addition to viewing agent data in the Performance Management console, you can use other available functions to manage your data.
- After you log in to the Performance Management console, you are
presented with a Getting Started page. Click any of the User Tasks or
Administrator Tasks to link to a scenario-based tour or video demonstration.
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links take you directly to the feature, such as the Threshold Manager. Community Resources links go to Frequently Asked Questions, the Performance Management forum, and more. - In Performance Management, a role is a group of permissions that control the actions you can take. Use the Role Based Access Control feature to create customized roles, which are the
basis of security. The following four predefined roles are also available: Role Administrator,
Monitoring Administrator, System Administrator, and Monitoring User. You can assign users to both
customized roles or predefined roles, and users can be assigned to multiple roles. You can assign
permissions to customized roles, or you can assign more permissions to existing default roles.
Permissions are cumulative. A user is assigned all the permissions for all the roles they are
assigned to.
You can assign the View permission and the Modify permission to individual applications, system resource groups, and custom resource groups. For example, if you are a member of a role that has View permission for an application, you can view all the supporting components within that application.
You can assign the View permission and Modify permission to system administration tasks. For example, if you are a member of a role that has View permission for Advanced Configuration, you can make and save changes in the Advanced Configuration window.
For more information, see Roles and Permissions.
- The Application Performance Dashboard gives you
a high-level status of the applications in your environment. View areas of interest either by
selecting from the navigator or by clicking in a summary box to drill down to the next level.
To learn about the features that are available at each dashboard level, see All My Applications - Application Performance Dashboard, Application - Application Performance Dashboard, and Group and Instance - Application Performance Dashboard.
- View KPIs from the Tivoli® Monitoring and Performance Management domains in the same dashboards
- In an environment that includes both IBM®
Tivoli Monitoring
and IBM Performance Management products, you can install the
IBM Performance Management Hybrid Gateway to provide a consolidated view of
managed systems from both domains. To view your hybrid environment in the Performance Management console, you must create a managed system
group, install the Hybrid Gateway in your
Tivoli Monitoring environment, and configure
communications with the Hybrid Gateway.
For more information, see Integrating with Tivoli Monitoring.
- Historical metrics
- Get visualizations of up to 24 hours of historical data on the Application Performance Dashboards. When a time selector is displayed in a
dashboard's Status Overview tab, you can adjust the time range for the charts
and tables whose values are derived from historical data samples. For line charts, you can also
compare the current data, up to the past 24 hours, with up to 8 days of historical data to spot
abnormalities.
For more information, see Adjusting and comparing metrics over time.
- Create your own chart and tables in the Attribute Details tab and share with others
- After you drill down from the All My Applications dashboard to a detailed dashboard for a
managed system instance, the Attribute Details tab is displayed for you to create and manage custom
historical line charts and tables that can be saved. You can save more chart or table pages for your
viewing only or to be shared with all users in the same environment.
For more information, see Creating a custom chart or table page.
- The transaction tracking feature enables topology views and instance level transaction
monitoring. Transaction tracking is available with the IBM Application Performance Management and IBM Application Performance Management Advanced offerings. Transaction tracking is
installed as part of the Performance Management server. Transaction tracking is automatically enabled for some agents but must
be manually enabled for others. Table 1
provides more information about agents that support transaction tracking.
Table 1. Transaction tracking agents Type Agent Enabled by default Can be manually disabled IBM Java application stack Response Time Monitoring Agent Yes No IBM Java application stack WebSphere® Applications agent No Yes IBM Java application stack HTTP Server agent Yes Yes IBM integration stack IBM Integration Bus agent No Yes IBM integration stack WebSphere MQ agent No Yes IBM integration stack DataPower® agent Yes Yes Data is shown in both the Aggregate Transaction Topology and Transaction Instance Topology views for all agents that support transaction tracking.
- Use Response Time Monitoring to monitor the performance and availability of websites and web applications from the browser through to the database, and to monitor mobile devices. Response time monitoring is available with the IBM Monitoring, IBM Application Performance Management, and IBM Application Performance Management Advanced offerings. After you install the Response Time Monitoring agents on any web servers you want to monitor, data that is collected by these agents is displayed in the Application Performance Dashboard with little or no further configuration required. Data from the Response Time Monitoring agent is used for the End User Transactions dashboards. In IBM Application Performance Management, and IBM Application Performance Management Advanced you can measure response time from the Browser, and data from the Response Time Monitoring agent is also used in the Aggregate Transaction Topology.
- Reports are available for data that is collected by the WebSphere Applications agent, the Response Time Monitoring Agent, and the Synthetic Playback agent. Transaction tracking is
required for Response Time Monitoring Agent reports (not
available in IBM Monitoring). For more information about installing reports, see Integrating with Tivoli Common Reporting. For report descriptions, see Reports.
If you have an IBM Tivoli Monitoring environment that is configured with the Tivoli Data Warehouse, you can send data from the Performance Management agents to the data warehouse for use in Tivoli Common Reporting reports.
- Most of the agents in the Application Diagnostics offering contain diagnostics dashboards in addition to resource monitoring dashboards. You use the diagnostics dashboards to drill down into the data to isolate specific problems.
- With thresholds, you can detect specific application behaviors and conditions based on actively
monitored definitions. Predefined thresholds are available for each agent and you can define new
thresholds for monitoring. For more details, click the Learn more link in the
Threshold Manager or Threshold Editor page.
In the Application Performance Dashboard, after you select an application, the Events tab is displayed. The Events tab shows the open events for the current application. You can drill down to detailed dashboards with performance metrics to help you determine the cause of the event. For more information, see Event Status.
- Managed systems in your monitored enterprise can be categorized by their purpose. Such managed systems often have the same threshold requirements. Use the Resource Group Manager to organize monitored systems into groups that you can assign eventing thresholds to.
For more information, see Resource Group Manager.
- Performance Management APIs are available for onboarding your environment such as to assign users roles and to create thresholds. For more information, see Exploring the APIs.
- You can monitor the availability of your internal websites by using the Synthetic Playback agent.
For more information about using synthetic transactions, see Managing synthetic transactions and events.
- The OS Agents contain a feature to monitor application log files. This feature includes the capability to configure log file monitoring based on regular expressions.For compatibility, the OS Agent consumes the following information and formats:
- Configuration information and the format file that was used by the IBM Tivoli Monitoring 6.x Log File Agent
- Configuration information and format strings that were used by the Tivoli Event Console Log File Adapter