Data Collection

TeamQuest Performance Software is capable of collecting performance and capacity data from a wide variety of applications, middleware, databases, operating systems, hypervisors and other IT components. Unlike many competitors, TeamQuest includes all of the data collection capabilities with our software. Two exceptions are the EMC and Network data collectors, which are packaged separately.

Our data collection mechanisms use the most efficient means available to gather the most comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date measurements possible. We partner with vendors to determine which data is important to collect and how to efficiently to collect it, so the collection method varies from platform to platform. Unlike many competitors, TeamQuest avoids using command line utilities or scripts (such as sar) to gather key performance data, keeping our collection as efficient and timely as possible.

Agentless Data Collection

When people say "agentless" data collection they refer to a situation where there is no need to install collection software on the infrastructure being measured, likely because the collection mechanism is built into the infrastructure and can be accessed remotely.

Much of the time when measuring operating systems you have to sacrifice detail to use agentless collection. TeamQuest Performance Software needs detailed OS performance data for the kind of serious problem solving and analysis capabilities it provides. Therefore, TeamQuest OS data collectors are largely implemented using very efficient agent-based technology.

TeamQuest Performance Software does permit an agentless approach from a number of non-operating system infrastructure components. Examples of IT components for which TeamQuest allows an agentless approach include:

• DB2 UDB
• Oracle
• Sybase
• VMware ESX and ESXi hypervisors*

* You may wish to install data collection software on guests to obtain detailed performance data for analyzing the applications running there.

Operating Systems

TeamQuest software collects data from the following operating systems:

• Hewlett-Packard HP-UX on Itanium and PA-RISC
• IBM AIX on POWER
• Microsoft Windows on Itanium, x64, and x86
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Itanium, POWER, x64, x86, and zSeries
• Sun Solaris on UltraSPARC, x64, and x86
• SuSE Linux Enterprise Server on Itanium, POWER, x64, x86, and zSeries
• Oracle Enterprise Linux on x86 and x64
• VMware ESX/ESXi Server on x86 and x64

Process Information

TeamQuest provides you with 100% of the process information occurring on the system. In general, TeamQuest operating system performance agents collect data at regular, user-defined intervals, but another agent captures process information that occurs between those intervals. This agent automatically uses process accounting when it is available on the system to account for processes that start and/or stop between the regularly scheduled sample intervals. No information is lost, and the overhead used to do this is insignificant. (Process accounting is not available on Windows systems.)

Virtualized Environments

Virtualization software vendors often offer performance tools that are "good enough" for their own environment. Such tools generally fall short of what you need for rapid problem solving or for precise business or IT service-based analysis and reporting. TeamQuest Performance Software fills that need and does it for all of your virtualized environments:

• IBM PowerVM (including LPARs and WPARs)
• Solaris (including Containers, Zones, LDOMs)
• VMware ESX and ESXi

User Agent

To augment the wide range of performance data gathered by TeamQuest-supplied data collectors, you can set up custom "user agents" to collect data on business processes, equipment, and applications unique to your site, network devices, device availability, disk usage by user, and much more. User agents allow for a non-intrusive, detailed analysis from custom sources.

Data gathered by user agents is stored and analyzed along with other performance data. The technology makes the user agent relatively simple to define.

Database Data Collectors

TeamQuest Performance Software includes data collection from:

• Oracle
• DB2 UDB
• SQL Server
• Sybase

Track CPU, I/O and memory usage by individual user sessions, and uncover disk capacity and I/O utilization for individual data files to find and resolve bottlenecks before they become serious. Ensure database objects do not exceed available capacity.

Web Server Data Collector

Process NCSA Common or Combined Log Formats, W3C Extended Log Format, and Microsoft IIS Log Format. Analyze performance using data such as throughput, connections per second, errors per second, file transfer sizes, and request times.

Microsoft Exchange Data Collector

Keep your mail server running smoothly by analyzing statistics such as work queue length and messages delivered per minute.

Network Data Collector

Analyze response time by watching traffic on your network or incorporate selected data within your performance database using SNMP.

EMC Symmetrix Data Collector

Augment system-level storage data with detailed EMC Symmetrix performance data to better manage the performance of a storage system that is shared by multiple hosts.

Learn about the statistical analysis capabilities built into TeamQuest Manager.