System Monitor

This section describes the AQT System Monitor. This component allows you to monitor internal information in your database, such as active sessions, bufferpool activity and other information. It has been configured for DB2/UDB (v8 and above), Oracle, SQL Server and Sybase Enterprise.

The System Monitor is part of the Extended Edition of AQT, and is in evaluation mode for the Standard Edition. When in Evaluation Mode, you are only shown one display and cannot refresh it.

The System Monitor display is as below. This will show you different information for each database-type, depending on what internal information is available.

The System Monitor can monitor a number of different part of your system. You can use the Toolbar buttons to switch between the monitor displays. If you wish to monitor multiple parts of your system, hit File > New Window (or Ctrl + N) to open another Monitor window.

Window Layout

The system monitor window consists of the following parts:

• the main display. This will show you the items being monitored.
• right and bottom grids. These show you details of the item selected in the main grid (these are discussed in the next section)
• action buttons. These allow you to perform an action on one of the monitored object (eg. cancel a session etc).

The right and bottom grids and action buttons may or may not be displayed, depending on what part of the system you are monitoring and how it has been configured.

Main Grid

This shows you the items being monitored.

• hitting the Refresh Toolbar button will refresh the data in the grid (and in the right/bottom grids also)
• if you only wish to show particular items, use the Filter box. AQT will only show rows that contain the specified text. Double-click this box for a larger window.

Right and Bottom Grids

• As you move to different items in the main grid, the right and bottom grids will be populated with data for that item.
• There is sometimes a choice about what details are shown in the right and bottom grids. These are selected with the drop-downs above the grids.
• Clicking on the Refresh buttons above the grids will refresh those grids only.
• You can close the right or bottom grids by clicking on the x at the top-right of the panel. You may wish to do this if you are not interested in the detailed displays and you wish to maximize screen real-estate for the main grid. Closing the detailed grids will also improve performance, as AQT won't need to fetch the data for these displays.
• If you close the right / bottom grids, you can re-open them with View > Show Right Grid (Ctrl + R) or View > Show Bottom Grid (Ctrl + B).

Auto-Refresh

The display can auto-refresh. This is done by setting View > Auto Refresh. You can set the auto-refresh period with View > Set auto-refresh period.

Note that AQT can only run one SQL statement at once. If you have auto-refresh switched on, and are using other functions in AQT, these other functions may fail if they run when the monitor is refreshing.

Other notes

• you can sort the data in the grids by clicking on a column header. The sort-order will be reset at the next Refresh. If you wish to permanently change the order in which data is displayed, you will need to customize the display (see the next section).
• you can click on View > Two-Color Display to show the grids in a two-color mode. However, when you do this any highlighting of cells disappears (this is overwritten by the two-color style).
• clicking on the Refresh toolbar button will refresh the displays.

Customizing Your Displays

You can customize the information that is shown in the monitor window. You would typically do this if you wished to:

• change the order in which columns are displayed
• exclude columns from the display
• change the criteria upon which a value is given a warning (yellow) or critical (red) color

To do this, go Customize > Main Grid (or Right Grid, Bottom Grid). This is discussed in more detail in Customizing Your Displays.

Technical Notes

AQT doesn't have any low-level hooks into the database. The information displayed in the system monitor is that which is available through normal SQL queries.

• for DB2/UDB, AQT uses the Snapshot Monitor information, which is available though a series of system functions. These were introduced in DB2 v8 and have been enhanced in v9. For more details, see DB2 Monitor Switches.
• to use the System Monitor with DB2, you need to be part of the SYSADM, SYSCTRL, or SYSMAINT groups. These groups are defined in the DB2 cfg; users are made members of these groups with operating system commands.
• for Oracle, Sybase and SQL Server, AQT runs queries against the "dynamic" system tables.

When will the System Monitor work with DB2 z/OS?

We are often asked this! This is currently not possible, as information on active threads etc is not available through normal SQL statements. Should IBM provide a means to do this (as they have with DB2/UDB) then we will very rapidly be able to display this information.