Diagnostic Monitor

Diagnostic Monitor

Overview

ProActive DBA Diagnostic Monitor provides real-time performance monitoring and diagnostics for SAP Sybase ASE servers.  It gives you a complete, easy-to-read overview of performance conditions that affect your database server, with drill-downs to view details about each area of the server’s performance and activity.

Major benefits include:

  • Comprehensive at-a-glance real-time monitoring of SAP Sybase ASE servers
  • Drill-downs let you get more details about current and recent historical activity
  • Distributed monitoring architecture lets more than one DBA monitor a server with no added impact

Features

Diagnostic Monitor’s Home page displays the major indicators which can impact your database server’s performance, including CPU utilization, disk and network I/O, running and blocked connections, physical resource utilization, cache activity and space usage.

From the Home page, you can click on any performance area to drill down to more detailed metrics for that area.

Operating System

Most SAP Sybase ASE monitors have one glaring limitation: they can’t show you conditions in the host machine’s operating system which are affecting ASE’s performance.

Diagnostic Monitor addresses this need by providing integrated monitoring of the Unix or Windows operating system, and showing ASE’s resource usage alongside that of the other processes running on the same host machine.

The O/S tab graphs CPU usage, disk and network I/O, paging/swapping and other key performance indicators of the host operating system.

It also gives a list of running processes, with performance metrics such as CPU and memory usage for each one; and you get a breakdown of system disk and network read/write I/O activity by device.

Detailed Sybase Monitoring

Diagnostic Monitor gives you a detailed breakdown of ASE process activity, engine usage, cache effectiveness, disk I/O and other metrics.  You can track trends historically and zoom in on periods of heavy activity.

Process Monitoring

The Process tab goes way beyond simplistic “sp_who” lists to provide you with full details on what any ASE process is doing.

You get a history of long-running SQL commands executed by a process, and you can also see blocking activity incurred by each SQL command, database object I/Os incurred by each SQL command, query plans and resource usage.

(For the most complete SQL monitoring solution, use ProActive DBA SQL Capture and TimeLine, which integrate into the same framework with Diagnostic Monitor.)

Locking and Blocking

Diagnosing blocking problems becomes a snap with our unique graphical Blocking Tree.  Users who are causing blocking are listed first, and victim processes that are blocked by them appear underneath, so you can easily view the causes and effects of blocking.

Cache Analysis

Our unique Cache tab gives you statistics on cache hit rate, turnover and other metrics, and you can view a complete list of all objects in ASE’s cache.  Find out which objects are using the most space in cache, and what percentage of each object is resident in cache.

Space Usage

Diagnostic Monitor watches your data and log segments in real-time and projects space usage growth for the next 1 to 7 days.

Graphical views let you track changes in used and free space historically; view current growth trends and projected “ETA to full” times for each database segment.

When used in conjunction with ProActive DBA Visual Space Manager, you get a complete, integrated space management and maintenance solution.

Table and Index I/O Activity

The Objects tab gives you a breakdown, by table and index, of I/Os that are occurring in real-time in the ASE server.  It shows you which objects are getting the most I/Os (logical and physical), and which tables are getting table-scanned the most.

You can see cache hit ratios by table and index, to identify tables and indexes that could benefit from having their own named cache assignments.

Technology

Diagnostic Monitor uses a variety of techniques to monitor your server’s performance.  Some information is gathered from the MDA monitoring tables provided by SAP Sybase ASE.  Operating system performance metrics are gathered natively using APIs provided by the Unix or Windows operating system your server is using.

Database Support

Diagnostic Monitor supports SAP Sybase ASE versions 11.0.3 through 12.0, and 12.5.0.3 through 16.0.