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Compare Brother-Hawk™ to the IBM DB2 Health Monitor

Feature/Capability DBI
Brother-Hawk
IBM DB2
Health
Monitor
Capable of sending email alerts to one or more individuals Box Checked Box Checked
Provides the ability to customize the format and contents of email alerts. Alerts emails can be sent as plain text, HTML, or short SMS Text messages. Box Checked Box Unchecked
Capable of sending SNMP trap alerts to central consoles such as Tivoli, Nagios, CA-Unicenter, or HP-OpenView. Box Checked Box Unchecked
Alert squelch feature that suppresses duplicate alerts for a customizable period of time, which minimizes alert noise. Box Checked Box Unchecked
Provides alerts based on real-time (current situation) observations Box Checked Box Checked
Provides alerts based on near real-time recent historical advanced computations and analysis Box Checked Box Unchecked
Provides the ability to automatically execute one or more DB2 or operating system commands when an alert triggers - virtually limitless automated response capability Box Checked Box Unchecked
Provides alert rule filters allow a rule to apply to all databases, a particular database, or even to a specific table in a specific database. Box Checked Box Unchecked
Provides the ability to tailor alert rules such that they apply to only certain times of the day or certain days of the week, plus the ability to govern the alert check frequency interval (number of minutes between checks). Box Checked Box Unchecked
Capable of providing alerts on automatic storage utilization and tablespace utilization Box Checked Box Checked
Capable of providing an alert to let you know that DB2 is "up" or not. Box Checked Box Checked
Capable of providing an alert on tablespace operational state Box Checked Box Checked
Provides alert capabilities for Private and Shared Sort Memory Utilization, plus percentage of sorts that overflowed SORTHEAP Box Checked Box Checked
Capable of providing alerts on the need for Table Reorganization, Statistics Collection, and Database Backup Box Checked Box Checked
Capable of providing alerts on HADR Operational Status and Log Delays (but why are you using HADR when you should be using Xkoto Gridscale for Active-Active continous availability?) Box Checked Box Checked
Capable of providing alerts on Log Utilization Box Checked Box Checked
Capable of providing alerts on Deadlock rates, Lock List Utilization, Lock escalation rates, and the number of Applications/Connections Waiting on Locks Box Checked Box Checked
Provides alerts for a poor Catalog Cache Hit Ratio Box Checked Box Checked
Capable of providing alerts for a poor Package Cache Hit Ratio (but supposedly DB2 automatically tunes this, so what is the need?) Box Checked Box Checked
Capable of providing alerts for a poor Shared Workspace hit ratio Box Checked Box Checked
Capable of providing alerts for Monitor Heap Utilization Box Checked Box Checked
Capable of providing alerts for Database Heap Utilization (but, again, DB2 automatically tunes this, so why is an alert needed?) Box Checked Box Checked
Capable of providing alerts for Catalog Cache Overflows Box Checked Box Unchecked
Capable of providing alerts for Package Cache Overflows Box Checked Box Unchecked
Capable of providing alerts for poor overall database health (a low database score indicating substantial problems or opportunities for improvement) Box Checked Box Unchecked
Capable of providing alerts for poor database partition performance and key performance indicators related to partitions Box Checked Box Unchecked
Capable of providing alerts for bufferpool hit ratio performance Box Checked Box Unchecked
Capable of providing alerts for database files closed Box Checked Box Unchecked
Capable of providing alerts when an SQL or XQuery statement uses a high percentage of CPU, in the aggregate, compared to other statements, within a specified timeframe (for example, during the past 15 or 30 minutes)
*** REAL PROBLEM ***
Box Checked Box Unchecked
Capable of providing alerts if a table incurs an excessively high percentage of Read I/O, in the aggregate, compared to other tables. Box Checked Box Unchecked
Capable of providing alerts if "Table Rows Read per Transaction" breaches a defined threshold which would indicate excessive scans and CPU utilization are occuring.
*** REAL BIG PROBLEM ***
Box Checked Box Unchecked
Capable of providing alerts when an SQL or XQuery statement uses a high percentage of Sort Overflows or Sort Time, in the aggregate, compared to other statements, within a specified timeframe (for example, during the past 15 or 30 minutes) Box Checked Box Unchecked
Able to provide alerts if overall disk read time (ORMS) becomes too high for the database or a tablespace Box Checked Box Unchecked
Able to provide alerts if overall disk write time (OWMS) becomes too high for the database or a tablespace Box Checked Box Unchecked
Able to provide alerts if the Asynchronous Pages Read per Request (APPR) is too low - indicating that prefetch I/O is failing and causing performance degradation Box Checked Box Unchecked
Able to provide alerts if the database Asynchronous Write Percentage (AWP) is too low Box Checked Box Unchecked
Able to provide alerts if the number of Logical Index Reads per Transaction (LITX) is too high - indicating the likelihood of Index Leaf Page scans and unnecessarily high CPU consumption Box Checked Box Unchecked
Able to provide alerts if the Synchronous Read Percentage (SRP) is too low - indicating excessive asynchronous prefetch I/O and the likely need to create missing indexes or provide higher quality indexes. Box Checked Box Unchecked
Can provide alerts for poor XQuery performance including, but not limited to, a low XQuery bufferpool hit ratio or a low XQuery Synchronous Read Percentage Box Checked Box Unchecked
Can provide alerts if average lock wait time is too high, there have been too many lock escalations, there is insufficient Locklist memory, there are too many locks per transaction, or there are excessive lock timeouts. Box Checked Box Unchecked
Can provide alerts if Index Cluster Ratios are too low, table statistics are missing, or if Indexes are defined without the MINPCTUSED clause. Box Checked Box Unchecked
Can provide alerts if the average number of Hash Joins per Transaction is too high - indicating that indexes are missing and CPU utilization is too high. Box Checked Box Unchecked
Able to provide alerts if the Index Read Efficiency (IREF) metric is too high for the database, a database partition, or a SQL statement - indicating that costly scans are occuring and CPU utilization is too high Box Checked Box Unchecked
Capable of providing alerts if CPU Busy Percentage is too high on the server, or if the database server's paging rates are too high Box Checked Box Unchecked
Able to provide an alert if database transaction response time averages, during a recent time period, exceed a certain response time threshold. Simply stated, the ability to tell you if response times stink.
*** HUGE PROBLEM ***
Box Checked Box Unchecked
Able to provide an alert if Service Level Agreement response time targets are not being met. In other words, the ability to notify you that you are not meeting your SLA targets.
*** REAL BIG PROBLEM ***
Box Checked Box Unchecked
Provides the extensible capability to alert on ANY condition! If you can code a SQL statement to test the condition, Brother-Hawk can provide an alert! You can even alert on business data - for instance, low inventory conditions or excessive bank withdrawals!
*** REAL BIG OPPORTUNITY ***
Box Checked Box Unchecked
Provides federated database Nickname operational status and Data Source Server alerts Box Unchecked Box Checked
Has a reputation for being buggy, causing locking and memory problems, and having high overhead (Here is one independent consultant's view: http://www.ebenner.com/db2dba_blog/?p=84 ) Box Unchecked Box Checked

DB2 Health Monitor vs. Brother-Hawk™


DBI Check Mark

During a recent worldwide Webinar, participants were asked if they were using the IBM DB2 Health Monitor:
  • No one indicated that they were using it and liked it
  • 25% confessed to using it but indicated they could be happier with it
  • 30% indicated they stopped using it because it was too buggy
  • 45% indicated the functionality was insufficient and were not using it

DBI is pleased to provide the DB2 LUW community with a superior alternative solution that offers far more flexibility and usability: Brother-Hawk
The integrated suite of DBI DB2 LUW Performance Solutions includes:
Brother-Panther® :: SQL Workload Analysis & Tuning, Performance Trends, and monitoring and analysis for all aspects of database and partition performance.

Brother-Thoroughbred® :: Advanced Transaction Time Analysis, Inside & Outside DB2 Time, and SLA attainments. Brother-Hawk™ :: The industry's most advanced Lights-Out alerting capability for proactive problem prevention and rapid identification of database performance and availability issues.

Brother-Eagle® :: Real-time performance monitoring of "What's happening right now?!?!?!" presented in a unique stock ticker format that doesn't waste the DBA's entire screen - complete with drill downs to details (Enterprise Edition only) and expert tuning advice. HEALTH MONITORING TRUTHS Read this

blog post on DB2 Health and Fitness Monitoring