Oninit® DrWatson
The Oninit® DrWatson Analyser is a rules-based diagnostic platform that extends far beyond IBM Informix analysis. While originally developed for deep Informix diagnostics, the platform is designed to analyse a wide range of enterprise diagnostic artifacts, including IBM WebSphere, operating system core dumps, application logs, JVM diagnostics, and other structured diagnostic data. By automating what has traditionally been a manual and time-consuming process, it helps organizations reduce diagnostic effort, improve consistency, accelerate problem resolution, and preserve expert knowledge.
The analyser works with standard diagnostic inputs and adapts to the level of detail available, ensuring useful insights even from partial data. By consolidating and interpreting information across multiple sources, it provides a unified and reliable perspective on system performance, stability, configuration, and operational health, enabling faster identification of root causes while reducing operational risk.
ifxcollect data provides a broad snapshot of the system, capturing configuration, environment settings, and runtime metrics across a range of collection profiles. This allows the analyser to assess overall system state, identify misconfigurations, and understand workload characteristics. From a business perspective, this translates into improved system tuning, better capacity planning, and a reduced likelihood of performance-related incidents.
AF (Assertion Failure) files contain detailed information about Informix engine failures and internal errors. By parsing these files, the analyser can detect known failure patterns, highlight likely root causes, and assist in diagnosing stability issues within the Informix engine. This helps organizations minimize downtime, resolve critical incidents more quickly, and improve overall system reliability.
onstat -a output offers a real-time view of engine internals, including memory usage, locks, sessions, and I/O activity. The analyser uses this data to identify performance bottlenecks, contention, and resource constraints, providing insight into current operational conditions. This enables teams to proactively address issues, optimize performance, and maintain consistent service levels.
The DrWatson platform also analyses a growing range of enterprise diagnostic artifacts beyond Informix. IBM WebSphere logs, JVM thread dumps, heap dumps, and javacore files can be examined to identify application hangs, deadlocks, excessive garbage collection, memory leaks, thread contention, and configuration issues. Operating system core files from Linux, AIX, and other supported platforms can be analysed to identify crash signatures, failing modules, signal information, and probable root causes without requiring manual debugger investigation. Application logs, web server logs, middleware diagnostics, operating system logs, and other structured or semi-structured diagnostic files can likewise be processed using the same rules-based engine.
By applying a structured and continually expanding library of expert-defined rules, the analyser transforms complex technical diagnostics into clear findings, prioritized recommendations, and business-focused summaries. Reports can be tailored for system administrators, developers, support engineers, management, or executive stakeholders, allowing organizations to reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR), improve operational resilience, standardize diagnostic practices, and leverage a single intelligent analysis platform across multiple enterprise technologies.