As a PeopleSoft Admin, I’m interested in numbers. Numbers from everything; sessions, queues, processes, load, errors, memory, CPU, IO latency… the list goes on. These numbers tell us what is occurring in our environments. Even better we can use them to build patterns and trends. If you don’t know your numbers how do you know what is occurring in your environment?
I’ve found over the years most PeopleSoft Admins don’t have all the numbers they need to do their job well. There are several reasons for this that I’ve seen, the most common being:
- A nice 3rd party solution is just too expensive
- Other solutions require too many resources or are unwielding to manage or learn
There are lots of numbers out there for the taking and they want to be seen. Some of the obvious favorites are session counts, jvm stats, and thread / servlet info from Weblogic. There are also the old trusty values kicked out from Tuxedo with psr, pq, pclt, and the less commonly used psc. I’m not even going to bring up Database numbers today (that’s a whole different party). These numbers are usually easy enough to get to but are provided in one time snapshots. Like what you get from psr or the Weblogic Admin Console. In order to learn more we need collect these somehow to review historically.
Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words?
I wanted something simple to use, fast to deploy, grabbed at least the basics, and was platform independent. There are lots of options out there but nothing seemed to fit the qualities I was looking for.
Last year I started working on my own set of tools that meet my criteria. What I have now is still in the very early stages. I’m writing several small utilities, that when put together, can give you a nice picture of what your PeopleSoft system has been doing. The concept is to keep things simple. I want to keep installation and configuration, start to finish, under 10 minutes.
Currently, I have a working Weblogic component and have started working on the Tuxedo 
monitoring component. The graphs here are samples of an environment I’m currently monitoring. These apps are currently in private beta testing phase. However I am considering opening them up to members, if I can get them cleaned up a bit more (maybe in April, free time permitting). If you’re interested please register (it’s free) and watch for updates.
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