Figure 19 HP Caliper GUI Advisor Menu
Generate Advice does the same thing as the toolbar icon: generate new advice from the selected performance data and display it in an Advisor view.
Show Advisor View brings up the Advisor view with the advice from the last analysis run. You can use this option to retrieve the Advisor view if you previously closed it. This action also appears in the Window/Show View menu.
Reviewing and Acting on the Advice
The hardest part of tuning the performance of an application is figuring out what to do. The HP Caliper Advisor tries to help with that. By analyzing already collected performance data, the Advisor tries to guide you to potential performance problems in your application and suggest possible ways to improve them. It gives three different types of advice:
•Improvement advice suggests specific actions that you can try that might improve a performance problem. This is the most helpful type of advice.
•Measurement advice suggests a specific HP Caliper measurement to take to further diagnose a potential problem. If you do make the suggested measurement run(s), then regenerate the Advisor analysis. Doing so will often trigger some more improvement advice.
•Explanation advice tries to explain what a specific performance metric means and why it might indicate a problem area. Ideally, this type of advice gives you some insight into a performance problem.
Not every identified performance problem will include all three types of advice. The advice you receive depends on the actual situation, the type of problem, and the data currently available.
Figure 20 shows an example Advisor report in the GUI.
Reviewing and Acting on the Advice 89