Monitoring performance in the WebSphere Portal environment

Guidelines to help you understand some of the basics of monitoring and measuring performance issues in the WebSphere Portal environment

To optimize the WebSphere Portal environment for optimal performance, you need to know what needs to be optimized. The monitoring methods discussed in this article cover several important aspects of the WebSphere Portal. They can help you view the real behavior of the WebSphere Portal environment and ultimately identify bottlenecks and potential problems. This article is intended to provide an overview of monitoring methods, rather than delving into any particular approach. This article provides a good starting point for most people who are responsible for solving this type of problem. Our goal is to introduce you to enough methods so that you can solve performance problems in a timely and cost-effective manner.

This article discusses the following topics about performance monitoring:

Cache

JVM Monitoring

Database analysis

Cluster

Log Logging and debugging

customizing page monitoring

IBM tivoli®composite Application Manager (ITCAM)

Cache

In this section, we focus on portal internal caching and dynamic caching (Dynacache).

Internal Portal Cache

The WebSphere Portal is a very complex application that uses a wide range of caches through WebSphere application Server. Optimizing these caches for your particular environment is critical to achieving a well performing portal. For standard installations, it is not easy to monitor these caches, and in many cases you will rely on logging to enable the appropriate level to determine the usage of a particular cache. This is a very inefficient approach that can be time-consuming and tricky. However, a Portlet called the internal portal cache manifest allows you to monitor internal portal caching and view important cache statistics, including:

Count of current cache entries per cache

The maximum number of cached entries per cache count

The configuration size of each cache.

Figure 1 shows the information in the CSV format provided by the Portlet.

Figure 1. Sample image of the portal internal cache manifest Portlet