Introduction › How to Troubleshoot in CA Chorus for DB2 Database Management

How to Troubleshoot in CA Chorus for DB2 Database Management

This scenario explains how a database administrator uses CA Chorus modules and tools to troubleshoot DB2 issues.

Your company strives to give its employees the best opportunity to succeed. As such, they have started a corporate initiative to monitor DB2 systems. To support this corporate goal, your company gathers the following metrics in a spreadsheet quarterly to confirm that they adhere to internal service-level agreements (SLAs):

• Number of critical issues
• Response time
• Closure time

To help ensure that the response time and closure time do not exceed the SLA, particularly for high severity issues, each morning your DBAs review the alerts that have occurred. The alerts are generated based on thresholds set in CA SYSVIEW for DB2. The Alerts module displays issues when a defined processing limit is reached or exceeded on the systems that the DBA is monitoring. The Alerts module lets DBAs monitor and investigate alerts from the workspace as they are generated. It contains all of the alerts that the DBA sees automatically based on the discipline.

For high severity issues, your DBA immediately responds to and resolves the issue using the following tools, which are accessible from the CA Chorus workspace. The following diagram and text detail the steps the DBA takes to investigate the issue.

1. Expand the alert instance to view details about the issue. The details point you to an area to drill down in the Investigator. For example, REMOTE SQL Statements Over 1 Second.
2. Launch the Investigator from the Alerts module.
3. Review the data in the Investigator to determine the root cause. To determine the root cause for an SQL statement issue, the DBA may drill into the following areas:
   • View an SQL statement to identify high CPU usage.
   • View buffer pool usage to identify high sync reads.
   • Explain the questionable SQL statement to ensure that the correct index is in use.
4. Perform an EXPLAIN on the applicable SQL statement to display the access path information and CA-supplied rules and recommendations.
5. To resolve an SQL statement issue, the DBA might perform one of the following tasks using DBA Command Manager for DB2 module:
   • Create a missing index entry.
   • Execute RUNSTATS with the applicable parameters.
   • Modify an index entry.
   • Modify a statement.
6. Save the path in the Investigation Launcher module so that other users can use this path to understand how you resolved the issue.
7. Add a note in the row of the root cause.
8. Confirm that the alarm is cleared in the Alerts module.

By using CA Chorus tools, a DBA can quickly and efficiently identify an issue, determine the root cause, and enter the commands to resolve it. These actions help improve their response time for DB2 database issues.