Autonomic Computing

The current version of DB2 (v8.1) has several existing autonomic features that have been in use for sometime as illustrated in Figure 3.1.

The full-function autonomic features are available to all DB2 clients. Autonomic capabilities examples listed from the above figure include the following:

• The Health Monitor: provides monitoring of key DB2 performance and reliability metrics and offers advice on resolving any problems that may occur. DB2 performs the following self-healing functions:

  • Monitors its own health right out of the box.

  • Notifies upon encountering unhealthy conditions: email, page, logs.

  • Advises on severity of condition, and suggests resolutions.

  • Initiates corrective action if required or requested.

• The Configuration Advisor allows even a novice or expert systems programmers to configure a system much more quickly—often doing in a few hours what previously would have taken an expert days to accomplish. For example, the Configuration Advisor automatically detects and senses system-related data about the required operating environment so that the configuration can be automatically updated when the hardware changes are detected.

  System information data is collected, such as:

  • Number of physical disks

  • Physical memory size (RAM)

  • CPU information

  • Number of online CPUs

  • Number of configured CPUs

  • OS features

  • OS type and release (OS2, Windows, NT, Unix, etc.)

  Database information is also collected, such as:

  • Size of the database

  • Number of tables

  • Number of indexes

  • Number of tablespaces

  Buffer pool information is collected as well, such as:

  • Name and size of each buffer pool

  • Number of buffer pools