Spotlight® on SAP ASE is a powerful diagnostic and problem resolution tool for Adaptive Server Enterprise. Its unique user interface provides you with an intuitive, visual representation of the activity on your database and operating system.
The underlying architecture for Spotlight is designed for ease of installation and use, and offers a range of tools to create custom solutions for problem diagnosis.
Spotlight® on SAP ASE is packaged in a quick and simple installation program.
Spotlight® on SAP ASE is a client-only installation. This agent-less architecture has many advantages:
Spotlight alerts you with visual and audible warnings and alarms when performance metrics exceed acceptable thresholds.
Spotlight’s unique graphical representation allows a database administrator to quickly spot performance problems on an Adaptive Server. Spotlight is tailored to show the process dataflow unique to Adaptive Server and to highlight performance-related details to the administrator.
Spotlight visually identifies problem areas: active sessions, locks, deadlocks, and disk I/O information providing extensive drilldown capabilities for rapid problem resolution. A range of reports and graphs provides you with detailed information about your server environment for up to 24 hours. This information can be viewed on the screen or printed.
When Spotlight detects a condition that appears to be a potential problem, it not only informs you about it, but advises you what you could look at to diagnose the problem further and suggests actions you can take to correct the situation.
Spotlight utilizes a powerful facility called calibration. Calibration allows each Adaptive Server being monitored by Spotlight to have its visual displays and thresholds dynamically adjusted. The adjustments are based on measured activity on the server. This allows Spotlight to represent each server’s unique performance characteristics in the context of the server’s expected behavior.
Calibration can be turned on for a designated period of time (ideally during a time frame where activity on the Adaptive Server is at typical levels). During this time, Spotlight performs statistical sampling on the metrics being monitored. These statistical values are then utilized by the metric components displayed and the related thresholds.
Spotlight graphically represents process flows within an Adaptive Server, allowing you to observe activity in real time. The speed of the flows represents true activity levels on the server. Flow speed is dynamically adjusted with Spotlight’s statistical sampling process called calibration.
Using a variety of methods, Spotlight defines the thresholds at which performance warnings and alarms operate.
This allows Spotlight® on SAP ASE to provide you with accurate and meaningful alerts quickly, out of the box.
You can customize each threshold level. In addition, custom actions (i.e., email, paging, etc.) can easily be assigned to any alert defined to Spotlight.
Spotlight has integrated with SoWin and SoUNIX to enable monitoring of Host CPU usage and related metrics. The Host CPU usage is now clearly visible on the Spotlight Home page. Linkage is provided to other SoWin and SoUNIX products depending on the type of server host that is being monitored.
Spotlight monitors historical data within its data repository. This historical data may be accessed through the Spotlight history browser.
