Data Collection Agents

TeamQuest provides a wide variety of agents for capturing performance data from applications, middleware, databases, operating systems and other IT components. Unlike many competitors, TeamQuest packages all of the data collection agents with the software. Two exceptions are the EMC and Network agents, which are packaged separately.

Agents use the most efficient means available to collect 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 agents as efficient and timely as possible.

Process Information

TeamQuest provides you with 100% of the process information occurring on the system. In general, TeamQuest 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.)

User Agent

To augment the wide range of performance data gathered by TeamQuest-supplied agents, 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.

Operating Systems

TeamQuest software collects data from the following operating systems:

• Hewlett-Packard HP-UX on Itanium and PA-RISC
• IBM AIX
• IBM i5/OS and OS/400
• IBM z/OS and OS/390
• Microsoft Windows on Itanium, x64, and x86
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Itanium, POWER, x64, x86, and zSeries
• Sun Solaris on SPARC, x64, and x86
• SuSE Linux Enterprise Server on Itanium, POWER, x64, x86, and zSeries
• VMware ESX Server on x64 and x86

Database Agents

TeamQuest database agents include:

• 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.

Application Server Agents

TeamQuest application servers agents include:

• WebSphere
• WebLogic

Perform detailed performance analyses using data such as number of sessions and servlets, threads created and destroyed, average number of active threads, and servlet response time. Measure and analyze thread and database pool statistics, as well as JVM activity.

Web Server Agent

Read 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.

SAP R/3 Agent

Augment system-level performance data with performance data organized by task type, transaction, and user. Analyze SAP R/3 buffers to make tuning adjustments and check memory to determine if roll, paging, extended and heap areas are optimally configured.

Microsoft Exchange Agent

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

Network Agent

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

EMC Symmetrix Agent

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.