The stability and performance of a UNICOM Intelligence cluster can vary greatly depending on the active projects. Large projects with lots of variable instances require more memory. Projects with complex routing require more CPU resources. Projects that use external COM objects (using CreateObject) can be impacted by the requirements of the external objects. For example, some objects may limit the number of simultaneous accesses, resulting in contention issues in a server environment. Other objects may load files into memory that increase the memory requirements. ADO objects could impact the load on the database server.

You can monitor and track many of these issues by using the performance counters (see Monitoring using performance counters). To monitor the actual performance of each project, and therefore the performance seen by the respondents (or interviewers), use the “per project” counters.

Monitoring per project performance counters becomes more of a challenge as active projects change over time. Companies with programmatic activation processes have an advantage in that the counters can be programmatically added into the monitoring tool. Alternatively, you can monitor transient counters by using tools such as IBM Tivoli or Microsoft Systems Manager.

For a list of all UNICOM Intelligence project counters, see Performance counters for UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer projects.