A big part of DBA's life is to ensure problems are identified before they happen. I am creating a check list of things to look for on daily and weekly basis e.g. tablespace size, errors in diag file etc.

Is there anything else you guys would like to add or if you already have a checklist, mind sharing with me.

OS :: AIX
DB2 UDB

dollar

I would add

Success of Every Day backups
Log archiving (you may compare the last archived log and the current active log)
Tablespace sizes
Success of other maintanence activities(like runstats, reorgs etc)
db2ckbkp once a week/fortnight on the backups
Performance (eg. the performance tool can collect info all day and summarize the next morning, say 7 am)

There will be more ...

Cheers
Sathyaram

If you are using DMS tablespaces you may want to check how full they are (difference between used pages and usable pages) for both table and indexes, if the latter are in separate tablespaces.

Are you using EE or EEE?

We have EE right now but size is running over 300GB so thinking of making a switch to EEE at the end of this year!!!

dollar

We have the monitor DBA tool from Quest called Quest Central for DB2 UDB. Its an excellent easy to use DBA monitoring tool with a very nice GUI interface. I highly recommend the product. However for bare bones DBA stuff:


db2 get snapshot for tablespaces
db2 get snapshot for database
db2 list tablespace containers show detail

And get snapshot for dbm.

When you move to EEE I will definitely recommend the global option of the get snapshot cmds.

Another we do on a regular basis is df -k to check db, dbm and archlog filesystems - it is a simple way to check for simmering issues like userexits not functioning properly, the need to prune database history files, the need to cleanup the db2dump dir, to find out how full sms containers are, etc.

I was thinking of writing a script to calculate all the hit ratios - someday when there's time....

I have a question about Quest Central - does it give bufferpool effectiveness, table and index usage information etc? Does anyone use any other monitoring tool?

I tend to use Quest Spotlight to know the current status of the database and instance ... It is quiet handy ..

BTW, it is a freeware version I use ... You can download it from the Quest site ...

I have attached a screen snapshot of the product ... It monitors databases and instances and also provides alerts ... There are a number of grey-ed out menu items, which will be available once you pay for the full license ...

HTH

Sathyaram

does this quest tool has any server side performance impact?

dollar

I think it will have a performance impact because it does snapshots on the server...

You can configure the refresh interval, say, 7200 seconds (2hrs) , so the impact may not be considerable

Cheers
Sathyaram

It looks real good. Does it need the monitor switches to be on? And if so, can it be configured to update them to on when it runs?

It updates them on the run, user does not have to do anything. A dialog box shows up and you check them...

dollar

We have a full licensed copy of the latest release of Quest Central for DB2 UDB v4.0. To answer your question, it does provide real time analysis of tables, indexes, tablespaces that require reorganization and other maintenance. I like it because we can track patterns quickly and easily for our large DB2 environment and the drill downs are quite nice. As sathyaram mentioned the Spotlight component provides real time performance measurements in a pretty GUI windows. The newest release of Quest provides hooks for other DBMS like Sybase, SQL Server and Oracle so this is much better for a mixed environment like we have at our company. The Quest puts a performance hit on SQL Server but not much so on DB2 UDB.

How about table and index usage information?