If you have AutoStrobe installed at your site, you can collect, display, and manage measurement session history information. This information enables you to more easily identify trends in the performance of a particular job step or online region and to quantify the results of your application performance management program.

This section explains how to:

• Decide how to implement measurement session history
• Work with measurement session history, using a walk-through approach
• Manage measurement session history records
• Focus the analysis on DBRMs
• Focus the analysis on transactions
• Automate the measurement, Performance Profile, and measurement session history collection processes.

Before You Begin

This section describes the tasks you need to perform before you can analyze the trends of a specific job step, DBRM, or transaction.

Deciding What to Collect

The first step is to select the job steps or online regions in which you are most interested. Possible candidates are:

• Job steps or critical online regions that you are tracking for performance improvement
• Modules that you have recently measured with Strobe and targeted for improvement based on analysis of the Performance Profiles
• Job steps that you have identified as CPU intensive

One approach would be to collect measurement session history for every job step that you measure with Strobe. The main benefit of this approach is that you can easily identify performance anomalies that warrant further analysis. Although the amount of data that you collect using this approach could become significant, you would not have to analyze each measurement. Instead, you could use the measurement data for analyzing trends.

Implementing a more proactive approach to application performance improvement would realize greater benefits over time. Collecting measurement session history for the job steps, transactions, and DBRMs that you have specifically targeted for performance improvement enables you to focus your efforts.

Collecting Measurement Session History

If you want to create and store measurement history records, specify the “Create History Record” option on the Strobe - Produce a Performance Profile or Strobe - Create an Auto Performance Profile panel. Strobe saves selected historical information for the measurement session, as well as some calculated values. This information is stored as a measurement session history record in the history data set.

To display history information you must first collect and store measurement session history records. For more information, see Collecting Measurement Session History in Automating the Collection of Measurement Session History.