PTC System Monitor

[kstevens]

We are new to PTC and have installed and are usingWindchill PDMLink, MPMLink and ESI for SAPrunning on 10.1 M020 for about 1 year now. We currently have about 50 users connected using SolidWorks and Creoand this summer plan to ramp up to 300-500 users. I am the only Windchill admin at this time and my question to the group is, would installing and configuring PTC System Monitor now (while it's quiet)be beneficial to me? How are others using this tool? Is it useful or just a dashboard to look at? Any comments, suggestions or insights would be greatly appreciated!

[AL_ANDERSON]

If you ever have a performance problem with Windchill, and call PTC tech
support for help, then they will need the PSM to help you fix the problem.
Without the PSM it is really hard for them to help you. Since I have
never installed a new Windchlil version without some kind of need to do
initial performance testing and tuning, I would say that you need the PSM
even for one user if you want that user to have as good performance as
possible.

The dashboard stuff is nice if you can figure it all out, but despite our
so far futile efforts to use the PSM proactively, we have found it
indispensable for reactive root cause analysis and performance tuning with
PTC tech support.

Al

[andrew_delk]

You would be a fool not to. Let me know if you need any help man. I would be more than happy to help you out.

[BenLoosli]

PTC is investing in tools that help identify problems with Windchill, which is great.
However, they also need to share the debug tools they develop so users can analyze the PSM results without being dependent on PTC.
In my case, I live in a secured Windchill environment and it is against company rules and security policies to send any information to PTC from my Windchill systems without the printed copy being reviewed and approved for sending to PTC. In no case will PTC ever get a file generated by PSM, they would only get a PDF copy of the file information. I have had some files requested by PTC for debugging run into the hundreds of pages which is just impossible to scan, convert and send.

I pay maintenance like all other PTC customers, but the more WEB based debug tools PTC develops, the less I get for my maintenance dollar!


Thank you,

Ben H. Loosli
USEC, INC.

[jessh]

To the best of my knowledge, it's not that PTC has special tools for
analyzing PSM data that are not provided to customers.

They certainly do, however, have human experts that are capable of
analyzing PSM data and finding the root problems. It is also often
unclear what data is all required to find and identify the problem -- so
limiting these analysts to printed copy will complicate and sometimes
drastically slow their efforts.

I'm not really sure how to solve this problem if one places a barrier
between the data and the experts at analyzing it. If the analysis
capability was all made available on the customer's site -- through
automation or fabulous training of customer administrators -- that would
clearly solve the problem. Unfortunately, neither the level of
automation or training seems achievable in the near term.

--
Jess Holle

[HugoHermans]

I've been contacted by dynaTrace directly. They knew we have the PSM installed. They offered a private training in order to master the PSM as it is installed, and they offered additional modules for Windchill on top. This is probably part of the story, and I can understand their motivation behind it.

Regards, Hugo.

[DarrenStorey]

sorry replied to wrong post