System resource monitoring with Pega Diagnostic Center
Pega Diagnostic Center (PDC) monitors components in your system and presents you with aggregated information about the resources that your applications use. You can use this data to check the health of various backing services and diagnose and resolve past and ongoing issues.
PDC provides statistics and detailed information about the usage and status of system resource components. The following landing pages in PDC can help you monitor system resources:
Database landing page
PDC monitors how your applications use the databases in your systems and provides statistics that help you instantly assess the most important parameters, for example, table size and the number of rows, and live indexes.
Analyze the data on the Database landing page to access key statistics about the PostgreSQL database in your system, for example, the most frequently run queries, index usage, cache effectiveness, and connection tracking. With this information, you can investigate issues with databases in your system and optimize how your applications use the databases.
For more information, see Database landing page.
In the following figure, click the + icons to learn more about the Database landing page:
Database optimization best practices
Databases are often the lowest throughput points in your system. Optimizing your databases improves the performance of your applications.
Indexes help make the database faster to use. However, keeping indexes requires resources. To save resources and optimize your system, you can use the information about indexes that PDC provides to reduce the number of indexes that the system does not use often.
As a best practice, analyze any large changes in index usage. If you notice a spike, check if the application was recently updated. For example, changes in index usage might indicate that the application now writes more data, keeps data for a longer period, or uses the data differently than before the update.
Similarly, monitor changes in the size of your database. A drastic decrease might occur, for example, after a database cleanup, but it might also mean that your application cannot access parts of the database. Conversely, an unexpected spike in database size might indicate a memory leak.
Periodically check the Active queries and Connection details on the Metrics tab. You can see if there are ongoing queries that are unable to finish, which can negatively impact the performance of your applications.
Live rows are currently in use, from which you can reference and analyze data by using a query. Dead rows are deleted rows without data that your data source marks for reuse when you use a write command, such as INSERT or UPDATE. When accessing data from the database, your applications scan all rows in the table, both live and dead. If your database contains too many dead rows, this state can negatively impact the performance of your applications. As a best practice in on-premises and client-managed cloud systems, configure your database to periodically perform an automatic vacuum process. You can manually start the vacuum process if you notice a substantial spike in dead rows. Pega Cloud® runs an automatic vacuum process.
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Nodes landing page
PDC displays both active and inactive nodes for on-premises deployments and client-managed cloud. If you use Pega Cloud, the Pega Cloud operations team manages the nodes.
PDC provides information about nodes, their health, build, JVM arguments, and configuration settings. You can subscribe to the Health status change notifications when a node encounters an issue.
For more information, see Nodes landing page.
In the following figure, click the + icons to learn more about the Nodes landing page:
Resource Utilization landing page
By reviewing the information displayed on the Resource Utilization landing page, you can correlate drops and peaks of resource usage with other issues in your system. PDC displays usage statistics and detailed information about the CPU utilization by JVM, heap utilization, and the number of requestors active in your system.
For more information, see Resource Utilization landing page.
In the following figure, click the + icons to learn more about the Resource Utilization landing page:
Search Information landing page
Check usage statistics and detailed information about default search indexes, the number of documents indexed, and the status of the host nodes.
For more information, see Search Information landing page.
In the following figure, click the + icons to learn more about the Search Information landing page:
DSS List landing page
PDC provides a current snapshot of dynamic system settings (DSS) for Pega Platform™ that internal processing creates automatically or users manually add. You can filter, sort, and export the list to a CSV file.
For more information, see DSS list landing page.
Use the Change History landing page to see a list of recent changes in dynamic system settings.
JVM Monitoring landing page
Access garbage collection (GC) pauses and memory pools usage in real time on the JVM Monitoring landing page. PDC listens for JVM MBeans notifications to help you understand the run-time behavior of your application and discover the reasons for critical performance glitches that are otherwise difficult to diagnose.
You can click a point in any of the charts to go directly to the Event Viewer and see events that occurred around that time.
For more information about JVM Monitoring in PDC, see JVM Monitoring landing page.
For more information about JVM memory management, go to the Oracle Java online documentation.
In the following figure, click the + icons to learn more about the JVM Monitoring landing page:
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