Introduction

Monitoring your database means you ensure that the database is available and nothing hinders its functionality. We can divide all the monitoring activities into the following three aspects:

1. System monitoring: In this, we monitor the overall system availability and use

2. Snapshot monitoring: This aspect is in fact a picture or snapshot of the actual state of the database at a specific time

3. Event monitoring: This is triggered on certain events, which gather statistics based on the event that is monitored

Note

There are many excellent tools available. One of my favorite tools is Toad for DB2, which is available as a freeware (certain restrictions apply). The commercial version has many more options for DBAs.

The Memory Visualizer and Health Monitor tools that are provided with DB2 provide a graphical user interface. The Health Monitor can be configured using the command line or by GUI, and can help you in your system monitoring activities. Everything works together, so let's see how...