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download a TopMon demo for Windows NT or Windows 95

TopMon® - The TOP END Performance Monitor

OBJECTIVE

One of the basic goals of any computing environment is to get the most work out of the least amount of hardware.  You want your environments to be faster, especially when they are under heavy load.  However, at the same time, we don’t want to purchase new hardware unnecessarily.

This, in fact, may be the main reason you purchased TOP END; you wanted to maximize your system resources.  However, how do you know when your system resources are maximized?  Somehow, you need to gather performance statistics for analysis.

CUSTOMER REQUIREMENTS

Although BEA TOP END is a powerful middleware product with many advanced features, it lacks the ability to provide customers with up-to-date performance statistics.  Often, these statistics are imperative for a customer’s environment. 

Since no tools are available to collect TOP END performance statistics, customers are forced to use archaic methods to gather the necessary information.  This often involves modifying existing TOP END applications to log time-stamps and using UNIX utilities such as SAR (System Activity Reporting) to assist in gathering performance statistics.  Obviously, these methods are less than desirable.  Additionally, these methods usually only collect a sub-set of what is really needed.

The performance monitoring problem is further compounded when multiple nodes are involved.  How can you collect the statistics you want from all of the nodes in your enterprise so they can be viewed from a single location?  The answer is: you probably can’t.  That is, unless you use TopMon.

MEETING THE NEEDS

TopMon automatically collects the performance statistics of TOP END applications on all the nodes in an enterprise, and forwards them to one central location.  These statistics can then be viewed using TopMon’s GUI display utility.  Performance can be viewed in a real-time mode via different built-in graphs; as the data changes, so does the graph.  Additionally, since data collected can be saved in a relational database released with TopMon, users can print reports showing historical performance.  Data can also be exported from TopMon’s database into a database of choice for additional statistical analysis.

Access to TopMon’s rich pool of information will help you better maximize your resources.  You will be able to:

	Track response times of end users
	Identify potential bottlenecks
	Identify problems associated with an application, database, network, or operating system

TopMon’s flexible design allows users to easily select which TOP END applications to monitor.  The scope can be as broad as all applications across all nodes in a TOP END system, or as narrow as a single service on a single node.

Existing TOP END applications do not need to be re-compiled or even re-linked in order to cooperate with TopMon.  Simply install TopMon right out of the box, and it will immediately begin to collect performance statistics for all of your TOP END applications.  Almost instantaneously your environment will begin to take advantage of the rich features of TopMon.

TopMon uses an innovative, low-overhead method to collect its performance statistics.  Furthermore, this innovative method allows TopMon to scale to UNIX networks of any size.  This includes environments from less than five servers to those with more than a thousand.

STATISTICS

TopMon collects 16 important statistics about your TOP END systems.  Some of these statistics include:

	Throughput
	Service Process Time
	Average, Minimum, and Maximum  Response Times
	Average, Minimum, and Maximum Message Sizes

Once collected, these statistics can be displayed in either graph or report form.

GRAPHS AND REPORTS

TopMon provides graphs for both active and inactive services.  Active services are those which are advertised by TOP END applications currently running.  Inactive services are those, which at one time were active and logged performance statistics, but the TOP END applications which advertise these services are not currently running.

Then graphs are selected against active services, the graph is displayed and continually updated with new data until the user terminates the graph.  When graphs are selected for inactive services, the graph is displayed with data for a specified date/time range. 

TopMon provides 16 different built-in graphs for users to choose from.

Figure 1 - TopMon Throughput Graph

TopMon also provides reports for both active and inactive services.  Reports are grouped into two categories: statistical and status.  Statistical reports show performance information about the selected services.  This information includes throughput, server process time, communication time, response time, etc.  Status reports simply display information like the number of nodes, applications, and services active between a date/time range.

TopMon Supported Platforms

The TopMon Administration and Runtime Software are currently supported on the following platforms:

NCR-MPRAS

Sun Solaris

HP HP-UX

Windows NT