1. Understanding the New PTC System Monitor (PSM/Dynatrace) Application’s Capabilities and Advanced Usage
Stephen Vaillancourt
PTC Technical Support –Technical Leaders Group
June 5, 2012

2. Better Understanding the Product Solution Monitor (PSM)
Agenda
Better Understanding the Product Solution Monitor (PSM)
Who am I?
Why install and use the PSM?
What does PSM monitor for, why and how?
How to use the PSM to a diagnose problem?
Sending PSM data to Technical Support

3. Why Install the PTC System Monitor?
Administrator Benefits
Reporting
Diagnostics
Dashboard
Administrator Problem Statement
PSM Capabilities
Administrator Benefits
Lack of visibility to end-user problems
Report on SLAs per business transaction
Reduces customer effort
Improves MTTR
Transparency for Admin
Troubleshooting is time consuming
Continuous 24x7 system monitoring through Sensors
No visibility into server health status
Alert and Drill-down Dashboard capabilities
PTC Benefits
Reporting
Diagnostics
Dashboard
TS Problem Statement
PSM Capabilities
TS Benefits
Troubleshooting techniques are complex
PurePath technology
Improves TSE efficiency
Streamlines communication with R&D
Fewer Long Running Cases
Lack of Production Ready Diagnostic Tools
Built-in diagnostic tools operate in real-time and on historical data.
Communicating data to PTC is time-consuming and iterative.
Session data is easily exported for remote diagnostic analysis.
© 2011 PTC

4. PTC System Monitor Capabilities
Reporting
Notifications
Diagnostics
Dashboards
Runtime engineers / PDM = examples where this would be helpful – reports / performance ACL / no verbosities anymore
Visibility prior to things getting out of site
Disconnected from R&D – Quality of data will help in backline assistance (TS & R&D) SPRs, reduces long running complex cases….
© 2011 PTC

5. PSM System & People Requirements
Operating System: x64 Linux, Windows, Solaris, AIX
CPU Requirement: cores
Memory Requirement: GB
20+ GB disk space storage
Administrator Training

6. Frequently Asked Questions
When can I get the PTC System Monitor?
It is available now through the PTC Software Download catalog
Is there any cost to PSM?
It’s FREE!
What PTC applications does PSM support?
Windchill 9.1 and 10.0 server components.
What is the story, why has PTC made the investment?
To reduce effort for administrators

7. Method Server Performance, Stability and Failure Modes
What there is to fear in Windchill ….
Catastrophic
All Method Servers Affected/Cluster Wide
More common causes:
Oracle not responding
Cache ‘storms’
Infrastructure failure
Dire
Method Servers not responding multiple times a day
Common causes:
Resource intensive operations
Configuration problems
Bugs
Important
Occasional Method Server stability problems
Some operations not completing quickly enough
Errors

8. How do These Problems Manifest Themselves?
Symptoms indicating a potential problem/What is Monitored for in Dashboard
Memory & Garbage Collection Problems
Increasing or high memory use is often precedes an outage or problem
High Concurrent Active Contexts
‘Context’s’ are Windchill threads, problems start when their count exceeds MaxDBConnections
High correlation with sudden large increase in end user response times
Long Running Operations
#1 Cause of stability problems and performance problems
Rule
3 transactions each taking more than 3 minutes within a 10 minute window
Queue Processing Behavior
Volume of entries in a queue or length of time one entry is processing
Agents Connected
Unconnected monitoring agents indicate a component is down

9. Using the PSM

10. The Main Monitoring Dashboard
Many metrics (through incidents) consolidated into system health indicators
How many transactions were long running
Transaction Volume
Cumulative Time Spent executing transactions

11. How to adjust a main dashboard monitoring default
Button Indictors Turning Red Frequently b/c of memory utilization incidents
Edit System Profile
Modify Measure
Change Threshold
‘Incidents’ Dashboard

12. Problem Diagnosis and Identification

13. Identifying Slow Transactions
Where to start looking?
User Session
Business Transactions
Database View
PurePaths

14. A Windchill Performance Problem Example
Identify one PurePath to investigate
Root Cause identification in under two minutes

15. Errors and Exception Identification
Stop looking at log files ….

16. Sending PSM Data to Technical Support
Right Mouse Click from many places #Export
User Session (preferable)
Incident
PurePath
Whole
Session

17. Bonus Slide: Additional PSM add-ons available at a cost
Visit the Compuware/dynaTrace Booth in the Exhibit Hall
3rd Party Products Extension
Monitor Non-Windchill Systems
dynaTrace Test Center Edition
Faster new software deployment
User Experience Monitoring
See the actual end user Performance

18. The End
Thank you
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