IBM WebSphere Application Server Performance Cookbook

Logging Custom PMI Data with Dynacache

  1. Administrative Console } Servers } Server types } WebSphere Application Servers
  2. For each server you will monitor: $SERVER } Performance } Peformance Monitoring Infrastructure (PMI)
    1. Click the Runtime tab
    2. Click the Custom link
    3. Click the Dynamic Caching link
    4. All Dynacache counters are considered low overhead, so select all checkboxes and click Enable (there's a little box at the top that selects all checkboxes)
  3. Administrative Console } Monitoring and Tuning } Performance Viewer } Current Activity
  4. Select all application servers you want to log and click "Start Monitoring"
  5. Click each monitored application server link and:
    1. Click on server } Settings } Log
      1. Duration = 300000
      2. Maximum File Size = 50
      3. Maximum Number of Historical Files = 5
      4. Log Output Format = XML
      5. Click Apply
    2. Click server } Summary Reports } Servlets
    3. Click "Start Logging"
  6. Reproduce the problem
  7. To stop logging, either stop/restart the application servers or go back into the links above and click "Stop Logging"
  8. The TPV files are in $WAS/profiles/$PROFILE/logs/tpv/

Notes:

  1. The PMI component must be enabled for the above steps to work. It is enabled by default and configured with PMI Basic. To check if it has been disabled, double check if "Enable Performance Monitoring Infrastructure (PMI)" is checked. By changing the configuration at runtime, this will enable PMI Basic statistics plus the other statistics explicitly enabled above.
  2. There is no way to automatically start PMI logging when a JVM is restarted. Logging must be manually restarted after a JVM restart either through the steps above or through wsadmin scripts.
  3. For details on metrics and analysis, see the Performance Monitoring chapter.