When working with the Diagnostics scenario in the Solution Manager, We must be very careful about the Introscope Enterprise Manager and always keep an eye on it to ensure the data collection is working well. The problem is that depending on the size of the landscape involved, this scenario can grow fast in complexity and it'll become difficult to identify if the EM is taking care of the job easily or if it is becoming overloaded.
The EM itself generates a file called "perflog.txt" which is simply a collection of performance metrics which are stored every 15 second cycle. This data is very useful to understand how the Enterprise Manager has been handling the load and if any action is required to improve its behavior. The hard thing about analyzing this file is that it generates a lot of data depending on how long the Enterprise Manager has been up and running.
With the help of my colleagues Roland Hoeller and allam.drebes/blog, a tool was developed to facilitate this analysis, and also share our knowledge with the customers. The EM Perflog Analyzer tool performs a series of checks in this file and provides recommendations accordingly. Right now, we're releasing it under version 1.0.0.40 and it can be downloaded from its wiki page.
In this version we've added 5 main checks to be performed over the perflog file, which are the following:
- Number of Metrics
- Number of Agents
- Java Heap Space
- Harvest Duration
- SmartStor Duration
Through these checks it is possible to identify if the EM is struggling to handle the load and needs any action from the user to correct the problem/avoid future issues. We plan to include more checks in the future as the tool develops further, but right now our focus is to deliver the tool with the most important checks and ensure it is working stable.
The main advantage of using this tool is that it'll make possible to understand how well the Enterprise Manager is working and predict issues beforehand based on the historical data present in the perflog.
I'm glad that we're releasing this tool today and I hope to hear the feedback from the community, to further improve the tool and facilitate the task of keeping the Enterprise Manager running well and reliable.
Please leave us your feedback and also let us know if you run into any issue when using the tool.
