The “R” in the title is no typo, no Q & A this time. The “R” does refer to the name Collection Services Collection in the screen shot, which is available in two flavours, but what is the difference?

Well, that is a question that is easy to answer. There are two kinds of collection Services Collections, the one most commonly seen and used is the Collection Services for historical performance data, the other one is the Collection Services for system monitoring.

More information can be found in the IBM i documentation dealing with Collection Services.

The amount of information available for Collection Service is rather overwhelming. Just an example, did you ever hear about “Collection Services to collect Application Response Measurement (ARM) performance data”?

I never heard about that, but if you want to learn more, visit that link and it is all there.

If you want to know more about my Collection Services Q and R, also present in this documentation, please continue reading.

In most cases the work has been done in the past and the configuration of Collection Services historical data is already done. If you want to review which choices were made, I recommend using Navigator for i (Nav4i) and the IBM Support document “Performance Data Investigator in Navigator for i”.

Screenshots are available there showing what is available in Nav4i => Performance => Collection Services Configuration. The settings I always use are shown below taken from Nav4i, but they can also be made available by using the SQL service “Collection_Services_info”.

So, the first to tabs deal with configuring the settings for the “Q” prefix used in the Collection Services historical data naming, while the tab “System Monitor Data” allow you to configure the “R” prefix used in the C collection Services system monitoring naming.

It is worth noticing that the “Default collection interval” is set to 15 minutes, but when investigating performance issues, 15 minutes feels like a decade. Over the years I have worked with changing that to a 5 minute interval, which allows me to be more accurate when investigating the Collection Services collection.

Using a 5 minute interval on the other hand, does not impact performance and disk space usage too much.

The lowest you can go with the interval value is 15 seconds, the highest is 60 minutes. For me the 5 minutes has always worked.

The last tab when configuring the Collection Services Configuration is named “Historical Data”. Activating this is needed for using the last two options available in Nav4i => Performance:

If you have not looked before at these two options, you want to read this Article: Graph History in IBM Navigator for i Overview.

With the two Collection Services collections available on your system, historical data and system monitoring, it is time to see how they can be used.

When selecting Nav4i => Performance => Investigate Data and selecting “Collection Services” as the Package Name to work with, over 200 graphs can be selected to get insight into the performance of your system. If you select “Monitor” for the Package Name just over 60 graphs are available.

The names of these graphs match with the one’s you can select in Nav4i => Monitors => System Monitor => Action(Create New System Monitor) as you can see below:

It is good to know that IBM i is using the Collection Services system monitoring functionality itself for System Monitors and made them available in Nav4i to help investigate what happened.

Let me end this article with giving you an example where both historical and system monitoring Collections services are handy. For environments with an independent ASP, the graph “Resource Utilisation Overview” available in the Package Name “Collection Services” shows your average disk usage.

This is the combined result of *SYSBAS and *iASP in use by this LPAR:

Selecting the Package Name “Monitor” allows you to select the graph “Disk Storage Utilization for System ASP (Maximum)” which shows you System ASP (*SYSBAS) disk usage percentage:

Also, the graph “Disk Storage Utilization for Independent ASP (Maximum)” available in the Package Name “Monitor” shows you the Independent ASP (*iASP) disk usage percentage:

Another very useful graph available in the Collect Service system monitoring is shown below, it is the “CPU Utilization (SQL)”:

When looking at this graph, the spikes give you insight as to when SQL CPU usage is high. My guess is that those spikes make you eager to investigate further.

So happy investigating Collection Services Collections!