8th Sutol Conference, November 2016
How to be a lion tamer
(or keeping WebSphere under control with free tools)
Sharon Bellamy James & Wannes Rams

Sharon Bellamy James
• IBM WebSphere since 1999 &
Connections since 2 / 2008
• Many years experience with -
migrations, installations, administration,
integration, customization
& DOCUMENTATION!! 
• Tiny bit of a Star wars & Disney fan
• Charity fundraising Cosplayer/Costumer
• Part of the team that brings you ICON UK
3

Wannes Rams
• Domino since 2000,
Sametime since version 6.5.1
Connections since 2.01
• Many years experience with
architecture, migrations, installations,
integration, customization
• Owner at Ramsit
• Hard core (average) table tennis player
• Social Connections User group
board member
4

Overview
• Nagios
• WebSphere PTT
• Nmon Visualizer

• https://www.nagios.com
• Nagios Core - The open source industry standard in IT infrastructure
monitoring and alerting
• Download Core: https://www.nagios.org/downloads/nagios-core/
• https://exchange.nagios.org – for 3rd party plugins and add ons
• Nagiosql (https://sourceforge.net/projects/nagiosql/ www.nagiosql.org ) - GUI
configuration interface
• Front ends – Looking glass -
https://exchange.nagios.org/directory/Addons/Frontends-%28GUIs-and-
CLIs%29/Web-Interfaces/Nagios-Looking-Glass/details

• IS FREE !!! – well open source
• Linux based – runs on RHEL or CENTOS
• Super easy to set up – very well DOCUMENTED 
• Features:
Monitoring - System metrics, network protocols, applications, services, servers, and
network infrastructure
Alerting - Nagios sends alerts when critical infrastructure components fail and recover.
Alerts can be delivered via email, SMS, or custom script.
Reporting - Provide a historical record of outages, events, notifications, and alert
response for later review. Availability reports help ensure your SLAs are being met.

Nagios & Websphere
• Basic WAS monitoring
• Up or Down check on soap port of each server
• Up or Down of host machine – via a ping or host up
command
• Plugins:
https://github.com/yannlambret/websphere-nagios - JVM heap monitoring, Server thread pools monitoring - including hung
thread detection, JTA transactions monitoring,JDBC datasources monitoring, JMS connection factories monitoring, JMS 1.0
listeners status monitoring, SIB queues depth monitoring, HTTP sessions monitoring, Clustering support, Administrative
security support
https://github.com/dvarounis/perfservmon - Perfservmon is a Nagios Plugin for IBM Websphere Application Server(WAS)
using the perfservlet web application that comes with each WAS installation. Can monitor - Heap Usage, Web Container
Thread Pool Usage, ORB Thread Pool Usage, JDBC Connection Pool Usage, Live HTTP Sessions, JMS SIB
Destination(Queue, Topic) Metrics

Nagios & HTTP
• Basic HTTP monitoring
• Ports up / down on 80, 443 and 8008
• Can monitor for specific codes 500 / 404 etc.
• WAS plugins in the previous slides also monitor HTTP
sessions.

Nagios & DB
• Basic up and down check
• Lots of plugins for monitoring
– https://github.com/angoca/monitor-db2-with-nagios - bunch of really useful stuff
- check_hadr_status - works with V10.5
- check_tablespace_size – 9.7 and up
- check_db2diag –9.7 and up
- check_instance_up – 9.7 and up
- check_instance_memory – 9.7 and up
- check_last_backup – 9.7 and up
- check_log_consumption – 9.7 and up
- check_log_usage – 9.7 and up

Performance indicators WebSphere
• WebSphere Application Server Performance Tuning
Toolkit (PTT)
• Free, Eclipse based tool provided by IBM
• Yes, it’s free and from IBM and it works 

WebSphere Application Server Performance
Tuning Toolkit (WAS PTT)
• Benefits:
– No install on servers
– Real time
– Rule based
– Easy to use interface

WAS PTT
• Install:
– Download, unzip, run…
• Configuration

Data Collection

Visual reports

Visual reports

Visual reports

Visual reports

Visual reports

Visual reports

Visual reports

Reports
• Ability to run reports (pdf, csv)

WAS PTT
• Ability to get tuning data (and update them)

WAS PTT
• Ability to generate:
– Thread Dump
– Heap Dump
– Enable Trace
– Show Connection Pool contents
– Get Server Logs

How to find performance indicators
HTTP Server: mod_status
• Apache module
• HTML Interface:
Ex. : http://www.apache.org/server-status

How to find performance indicators
HTTP Server: mod_status

How to find performance indicators
HTTP Server: mod_status
• Easy to setup in httpd.conf

Nmon Visualizer
• Easier than the excel file
• Open source tool
• Developed by IBM to monitor Smartcloud
• Apache 2.0 License
• nmon files from Linux and AIX, IOStat files, IBM Verbose
GC logs, Windows Perfmon & ESXTop csv data and
JSON data

Nmon Visualizer

Nagios & DB2 Monitoring
• Each script is individually configurable
• Edit the script directly or use GUI config (nagiosQL)
• Alerting settings are configured at
Nagios level

Nagios & DB2 Monitoring
• https://github.com/angoca/monitor-db2-with-nagios
• check_connection_qty - quantity of connections on the
database and the state they are currently in, lockwait,
connecting, rollback etc ..
• check_database_connection – checks a connection to the DB
• check_database_size – set threshold alerts, etc.
• check_lock_wait – 10.5 and above – checks lock waits
• check_memory_usage - usage memory: total, free, usage
• check_open_files – open files per instance

References and links
• Performance Tuning Toolkit
– http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/downloads/performtuning.html
• Mod_status
– http://www.tecmint.com/monitor-apache-web-server-load-and-page-statistics/
• Nmon Visualizer
– http://nmonvisualizer.github.io/nmonvisualizer/

References and links
• Nagios
– Core Download - https://www.nagios.org/downloads/nagios-core/
– Nagios Exchange - https://exchange.nagios.org
– DB2 Plugins - https://github.com/angoca/monitor-db2-with-nagios
http://www.dbatodba.com/db2/scripts-db2/nagios-plugins/
– WebSphere Plugins - https://github.com/yannlambret/websphere-nagios
https://github.com/dvarounis/perfservmon

Any Questions?

Thank you
http://socialshazza.com
dilftechnical
@socialshazza
http://ramsit.com/blog
wannesrams
@wannesrams