PeopleTools 8.54: Performance Performance Monitor Enhancements

This is part of a series of articles about new features and differences in PeopleTools 8.54 that will be of interest to the Oracle DBA.

Transaction History Search Component

There are a number of changes:

• You can specify multiple system identifiers.  For example, you might be monitoring Portal, HR and CRM.  Now you can search across all of them in a single search.
• It has always been the case that when you drill into the Performance Monitoring Unit (PMU), by clicking on the tree icon, you would see the whole of a PMU that invoked services from different systems.
• You can also specify multiple transaction types, rather than have to search each transaction type individually.

This is a useful enhancement when searching for a specific or a small number of transaction.  However, I do not think it will save you from having to query the underlying transactions table.

PPM Archive Process

The PPM archive process (PSPM_ARCHIVE) has been significantly rewritten in PeopleTools 8.54.  In many places, it still uses this expression to identify rows to be archived or purged:

%DateTimeDiff(X.PM_MON_STRT_DTTM, %CurrentDateTimeIn) >= (PM_MAX_HIST_AGE * 24 * 60)

This expands to

ROUND((CAST(( CAST(SYSTIMESTAMP AS TIMESTAMP)) AS DATE) - CAST((X.PM_MON_STRT_DTTM) AS DATE)) * 1440, 0)
   >= (PM_MAX_HIST_AGE * 24 *  60)

which has no chance of using an index.  This used to cause performance problems when the archive process had not been run for a while and the high water marks on the history tables had built up.

Now, the archive process now works hour by hour, and this will use the index on the timestamp column.

"… AND X.PM_MON_STRT_DTTM <= SYSDATE - PM_MAX_HIST_AGE 
and (PM_MON_STRT_DTTM) >= %Datetimein('" | DateTimeValue(&StTime) | "')
and (PM_MON_STRT_DTTM) <= %DateTimeIn('" | DateTimeValue(&EndTime) | "')"

Tuxedo Queuing

Since Performance Monitor was first introduced, event 301 has never reported the length of the inbound message queues in Tuxedo.  The reported queue length was always zero.  This may have been fixed in PeopleTools 8.53, but I have only just noticed it

Java Management Extensions (JMX) Support

There have been some additions to Performance Monitor that suggest that it will be possible to extract performance metrics using JMX.  The implication is that the Oracle Enterprise Manager Application Management Pack of PeopleSoft will be able to do this.  However, so far I haven't found any documentation. The new component is not mentioned in the PeopleTools 8.54: Performance Monitor documentation.

• New Table
• PS_PTPMJMXUSER - keyed on PM_AGENTID
• New Columns
• PSPMSYSDEFAULTS - PTPHONYKEY.  So far I have only seen it set to 0.
• PSPMAGENT - PM_JMX_RMI_PORT.  So far only seen it set to 1
• New Component

Undocumented (until PeopleTools 8.55) Application Engine Parameter: EnableAEMonitoring

This is part of a series of articles about new features and differences in PeopleTools 8.54 that will be of interest to the Oracle DBA.
Update: This parameter was documented from PeopleTools 8.55!

Oracle Support Document 1640355.1: E-AE: Performance Degradation When Using Do Loop Action to Process Large Amount of Data on PT 8.52 & PT 8.53 describes a performance problem in Application Engine in a small but frequently executed loop.  Application Engine calls DBMS_APPLICATION_INFO to set MODULE and ACTION on v$session each time it goes round the loop.

However, Oracle Bug 10130415  Latch contention on "resmgr group change latch" acknowledges a problem in some versions of Oracle, but it is resolved in 11.2.0.3 and 12c.
Updated 8 May 2015: Oracle support do not know of any explicit link between the support document and this database bug.

A new parameter was introduced in PT8.54 and backported to PT8.52.23 and PT8.53.13 in the Database Options section of the process scheduler configuration file (psprcs.cfg).  EnableAEMonitor controls whether Application Engine calls DBMS_APPLICATION_INFO.  The default value for this parameter is 0.

The PeopleSoft support document does not reference the database bug report, but it seems reasonable to infer that the new parameter was introduced to work around the database bug.

This new parameter is not described in PeopleBooks until PeopleTools 8.55.  It does appear in the delivered configuration files on at least 8.53.13.  However, it is not present in the delivered 8.54.05 configuration file (bug 21055140). Therefore, by default, Application Engine will not set the module and Action unless you add it to the configuration file.

[Database Options]
;=========================================================================
; Database-specific configuration options
;=========================================================================
…
;DMK - added to enable DBMS_APPLICATION_INFO instrumentation
EnableAEMonitoring=1

Then the behaviour is then as it has been since 8.52, described in PeopleTools 8.52 Application Engine sets MODULE and ACTION.

My Recommendation 

I certainly think that you should add this parameter to all process scheduler configuration files at relevant PeopleTools version.  Unless you specifically have the problem described in the support note, I recommend that you also set the parameter to 1 as shown above. I have never seen the problem in affected database versions, and it is fixed in the terminal release of 11g.

Without setting the parameter, you will lose the ability to relate Enterprise Manager and ASH data to specific application engine steps.  If you need to make a code change to achieve a performance improvement you will have to go through the manual process of finding the SQL in an application engine trace.