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Index Specifier Data Cell

Index specifiers are data cells that indicate a specific occurrence of a sub-record that has a unique characteristic in one of these domains:

• COMMUNICATION
• CONFIGURATION
• CPU
• DISK
• FILE
• PROCESS
• TAPE

During analysis, the Performance Manager reads an interval record. The Performance Manager evaluates rules in the following domains:

• LOCAL
• PROCESS
• DISK
• FILE
• CPU
• COMMUNICATION
• CONFIGURATION
• TAPE

Data cells available in the LOCAL domain are available to rules in all of these domains. You can reference data cells in the PROCESS, DISK, FILE, CPU, COMMUNICATION, CONFIGURATION, or TAPE domains and not in the LOCAL domain directly by rules within that domain, or indirectly with an index specifier to data cells in any of the other domains. Each index specifier data cell has a target domain. The target domain indicates the name of the domain of the desired data cell.

For example, the index specifier TOP_CPU_PROC_X points to a specific process sub-record for the current interval. You might use the index specifier in rule definitions in the LOCAL, DISK, FILE, CPU, COMMUNICATION, CONFIGURATION, or TAPE domains.

Specify the PROCESS domain data cell with the index specifier as a parameter. A rule expression for a rule in the LOCAL domain is as follows:

PROCESS_CPUTIME(TOP_CPU_PROC_X)

This expression calculates which process has the highest CPU time. Although PROCESS_CPUTIME is a PROCESS domain data cell, TOP_CPU_PROC_X is a LOCAL domain index specifier that has a target domain of PROCESS. So, you can reference any PROCESS domain data cell from a rule in the LOCAL domain by using an index specifier with the target domain of PROCESS. The maximum index depth for index specifiers is two.