Chapter 8. Monitoring and Tuning

Keeping your WebSphere Application Server (WAS) system well-oiled is paramount to keeping your environment as trouble-free as possible. In the software world, for some strange reason, things break and they stop running. This can be due to software bugs, network traffic, server load, and so on. By tuning your environment, you will ensure your applications perform as well as possible and, by monitoring them, you will be able to keep an eye on your systems to ensure that they run error-free.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Using Tivoli Performance Viewer (TPV)

• Request metrics and PMI

• Dynamic caching

• Java Virtual Machine (JVM) parameters

• Java core dumps

• Java heap dumps

• Basic JVM tuning

Before we look at how to tune WAS configuration, we will need to look at some of the tools that are provided within WAS itself, which can be used to view runtime metrics and monitor the state of deployed applications. We will then discuss some of the key JVM and configuration...