Why go Pro?

Why upgrade to Brother-Eagle Professional Edition?

Certainly the most compelling reason is the capability to easily add your own monitoring metrics.  Brother-Eagle for DB2 comes supplied with 24 very helpful measurements, but you may want to add more.  Let me explain how easy this is to do by providing an example of another helpful metric (Active Sorts).

1. Start Brother-Eagle
2. Connect to the database you want to monitor
3. Click the Menu button, and choose Create Parameter
4. In the Name text field, enter a name for the new metric such as ActiveSorts.  This name will be shown in the scrolling display.
5. Check the Rate box if the new metric should be expressed as some count per second.  For ActiveSorts, leave the Rate box unchecked.
6. Let's assume that we know our TEMPSPACE tablespace has capacity for 20 concurrent sorts.  We want a warning status ( orange ) if 10 or more active sorts are under way, and an alert status ( red ) if more than 15 active sorts are concurrently executing.   In the Warning High Threshold box, type 10, and in the Alert High Threshold box, type 15.
7. In the SELECT statement box, enter the following:  select active_sorts from syscatv82.snapdb
8. Click the Append button to add the WHERE clause which limits the results of the query to the database you are monitoring and the specified partition number.
9. Each metric can have advice.  You could optionally direct the advice for ActiveSorts to a web page hosted at your site.  For example, you might supply a URL in the format of:   http://intranet.yourcompany.com/advice/activesorts.html
10. Lastly, click the Test button on the lower left hand side of the Custom Parameter window.  This will run the query to test that it successfully returns a single numeric value.
11. After you complete a successful Test, the Save button will become active.  Click Save to add the new metric, ActiveSorts in this example, to the Brother-Eagle display.

Hopefully this example demonstrates how easy it is to customize Brother-Eagle Professional Edition.  If you use your imagination, the sky is the limit.  Any SQL statement that returns one numeric value is valid, including accessing other database catalog tables or even user data tables.

If you add a custom metric to Brother-Eagle and believe it may be valuable to others, please join this blog and contribute your metric here. 

Best regards,

Scott