• The New Capabilities IBM Added To Navigator For i

  April 23, 2025 Alex Woodie

  The addition of multi-factor authentication (MFA) to IBM i 7.6 is the big news with the recent operating system update from IBM. But IBM has introduced new capabilities to other parts of the platform as well, and some of the biggest reside in Navigator for i.

  As the strategic Web-based console for administrating the IBM i server, it’s natural that Navigator for i gets lots of attention. Whether you’re looking to monitor or manage the databases, inspect batch jobs, configure security, or monitor performance, Navigator for i is the one central place that lets you do it. You can, of …

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• IBM Bolsters New Nav With Job Scheduler And More

  April 24, 2023 Alex Woodie

  IBM i professionals finally can access the Advanced Job Scheduler from Navigator for i as a result of the new Technology Refreshes (TRs) that IBM unveiled on April 11. But the job scheduler is just one of a number of new capabilities that IBM is bringing to the snazzy new Web-based interface for administrators and power users, which Big Blue would very, very much like for you to use.

  When IBM debuted the new Navigator for i in the fall of 2021 with release of IBM i 7.3 TR11 and 7.4 TR5, it figured it had the luxury of time …

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• IBM Publishes Power10 Performance Optimize Guide

  December 7, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops looking to squeeze the most performance out of their Power10 servers have a lot of options available at their disposal. IBM covers many, if not all, of them in its latest performance paper, titled “IBM Power10 performance optimization for IBM i,” which it released last week.

  The Power10 is the most powerful processor IBM ever built. Compared to the Power9 processor, the Power10 delivers 20 percent to 30 percent higher performance per core. And with 25 percent more cores per socket, that means oodles of more processing power to do useful work.

  At a system level, the …

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• Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing, Case 5 – Using IBM i PDI Charts To Answer Performance Questions

  July 18, 2022 Satid Singkorapoom

  During my long career as an IBM i performance specialist, it was natural for people to ask me performance-related questions of various kinds. But in many cases, it seemed to me that the customer could not understand my answers, and I could not provide supporting evidence due to the lack of a performance reporting tool that could produce easy-to-understand explanatory information. The situation changed for the better with the availability of IBM i Performance Data Investigator (PDI) tool as of release 6.1. I would say that the PDI tool provides charts of information that resemble those used by business people …

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• Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing Case 4 – Investigating Time-Sensitive Transaction Issues

  June 6, 2022 Satid Singkorapoom

  Among the central processing hardware resources in a computer system – CPU, GPU, memory, disk, PCI-Express I/O bus – disk has always been the slowest component. Even the latest flash disk or NVM-Express flash drive or card is slowest, but not by much. Back in the days of hard disk, disk I/O was the most popular cause of performance problems. From experience, I always looked at it first in my investigation.

  The modern SAN flash disk can still be the performance bottleneck when it is not deployed properly, as I shared in Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing, Case 3 – …

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• Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing, Case 3 – When Performance Issues Come From Without

  April 4, 2022 Satid Singkorapoom

  When I started my IT career 35 years ago, it was in the “centralized” universe that originated from the mainframe model. All core application codes ran in one — and only one — big iron that all users accessed with “dumb” terminals devoid of any GUI. Problem solving in AS/400 systems was frequently straightforward and not time consuming because most cases were anything but elusive.

  But the contemporary IT infrastructure universe has evolved into a big onion, with layers that we must peel while troubleshooting. I often find myself having to address a problem in multiple layers, and it no …

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• Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing, Case 2 – Dealing With CPU Queuing Wait Time

  March 21, 2022 Satid Singkorapoom

  When we drive our cars, we hope to avoid red lights and traffic jams, because we all hate waiting immobile in traffic. I’m sure that you are aware, fully or subtly, that active jobs in any computer system can encounter wait as well. The IBM i developer team has categorized many types of wait.

  In this article, let’s look at CPU Queuing wait time. Let’s see how we can interpret and address it in a sensible way to resolve poor performance. I’ll try to provide you with a useful approach to wait time analysis using a gloriously useful performance reporting …

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• New Nav Puts SQL Services Within Reach

  September 15, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM delivered new Technology Refreshes (TRs) for IBM i 7.3 and 7.4 last week, and there’s a lot of good stuff in there. Arguably one of the biggest announcements is the overhaul of IBM i Navigator, which the folks at IBM have taken to calling “New Nav.” But what makes New Nav so special?

  IBM rewrote New Nav from the ground up in Angular, a JavaScript framework for building Web and mobile applications, and PrimeNG, a popular component library for Angular. The combination of these two technologies gives New Nav a fresh-looking interface that will appeal to users of all …

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• Guru: Understanding Database Performance Using The Performance Data Investigator, Part 2

  June 28, 2021 Dawn May

  This is the second in a two-part series on how you can use the Performance Data Investigator (PDI) to investigate performance of Db2 for i. While the SQL Performance Center in Access Client Solutions is more commonly known than PDI, using both tools is a good way to analyze database performance.

  In Part 1, I reviewed the Database content package, focusing on the charts for I/O reads and writes, SQL CPU utilization, and database locks. In this tech tip, I continue by reviewing the charts related to SQL Cursor and Native DB Opens as well as the SQL Performance …

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• Guru: Understanding Database Performance Using The Performance Data Investigator, Part 1

  June 21, 2021 Dawn May

  This is a two-part series on how to use the Performance Data Investigator (PDI) for investigating performance of Db2 for i. While the SQL Performance Center in Access Client Solutions is the tool of choice for Db2 performance analysis, there is valuable information that you can get from using PDI. PDI is often a useful starting point to help guide you in the correct direction when trying to identify performance issues. In my experience, PDI is under-utilized for Db2 investigation. For those not familiar with PDI, you may want to read the article, Getting Started with the Performance Data Investigator …

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