Oninit® DrWatson — Automated Informix Diagnostics

Oninit® DrWatson is a rules-based diagnostic platform for IBM Informix. It reads the diagnostic data Informix already produces and turns it into prioritized findings and ready-to-execute recommendations — automating what has traditionally been a manual and time-consuming process, and helping organizations reduce diagnostic effort, improve consistency, accelerate problem resolution, and preserve expert knowledge.

DrWatson 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.

What DrWatson analyses

ifxcollect data provides a broad snapshot of the system, capturing configuration, environment settings, and runtime metrics across a range of collection profiles. This allows DrWatson to assess overall system state, identify misconfigurations, and understand workload characteristics — improved system tuning, better capacity planning, and a reduced likelihood of performance-related incidents. See Configuration Audit for the ONCONFIG side of this.

AF (Assertion Failure) files contain detailed information about Informix engine failures and internal errors. By parsing these files, DrWatson can detect known failure patterns, highlight likely root causes, and assist in diagnosing stability issues within the Informix engine — see Health & Errors.

onstat -a output offers a real-time view of engine internals, including memory usage, locks, sessions, and I/O activity. DrWatson uses this data to identify performance bottlenecks, contention, and resource constraints, providing insight into current operational conditions.

Beyond Informix

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.

What you get

By applying a structured and continually expanding library of expert-defined rules, DrWatson transforms complex technical diagnostics into clear findings, prioritized recommendations, and business-focused summaries. Reports can be tailored for system administrators, architects, or management and 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.

How it works

Upload diagnostic data through the portal — no agent, no schema change anywhere in your estate. DrWatson processes the submission and returns a branded report with the findings and recommendations above.

Security & privacy

Submissions are treated as confidential and scoped to their own customer-addressed storage area. See Security & Privacy for how DrWatson handles uploaded data, and Obfuscation for what you can scrub before upload.