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