| DCOM Explained by Rosemary Rock-Evans Digital Press ISBN: 1555582168 Pub Date: 09/01/98

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### Performance Monitoring

Performance Monitoring is the capture of quantitative data on the performance of the applications, middleware, and network to analyze the information and take corrective action to improve the configuration and, thus, its performance. The middleware should monitor times (maximum, minimum, average, and median) and volumes (maximum, minimum, average, and median).

Windows NT has a Performance Monitor and Performance Analyzer. The Task Manager also provides a simple graph of processor time taken by each application and can monitor process status.

Transaction Server-With the Transaction Server Performance Monitor, the administrator can monitor performance and view transaction statistics. The statistics collected can be cumulative or current. Current statistics can be such things as the number of active transactions, maximum number of active transactions, and number of in-doubt transactions.

The aggregate figures can cover such things as the number of committed, aborted, forced commit, and forced abort transactions. Other statistics covered include the duration of transactions.

MSMQ-MSMQ Explorer is used to monitor the performance of MSMQ. Queue, session, queue manager, and other objects can be monitored. Also included is a network monitor parser that enables the administrator to monitor messages on the network. Two parsers are included—one compatible with

Windows NT Server Network Monitor and the other compatible with SMS Network Monitor.

### In Summary

Microsoft’s tools for the administrator are actually vastly better than many of the CORBA ORB tools or tools with RPC products—even DCE, which in its raw form provides command line and very basic administration utilities (although many add-ons from third parties have improved this situation). It also has the advantage of being from a central console covering the entire network—a feature not often provided in MOM products, for example.

But it cannot yet match the sophistication of DTPM products and their administration tools, which already provide centralized administration from a single console and provide unified monitoring, installation, configuration, and problem resolution tools. Perhaps of most importance, however, is that Microsoft’s administration tools only cover Windows NT—a really serious deficiency that will make administration on other platforms something of a problem. DTPM products soundly beat DCOM in this respect as all the DTPM tools provide a single common central console for administration with the functionality I have described on all the platforms they support—Unix, Windows (all sorts of Windows) mainframe, AS/400, and so on.

So, on the whole, at the moment DCOM administration can be characterized as being better than many middleware products, but et as good as the best products on the market.

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