FAQ - Performance Advisor for PTC Windchill

Performance Advisor for PTC Windchill is currently available for the following releases of Windchill:

• Windchill 11.0 F000 and above
• Windchill 10.2 M030 (required patch available for download here)

Below is a compilation of some frequently asked questions (FAQ) regarding Performance Advisor for PTC Windchill that we have posted here for your benefit.  For the latest, up-to-date FAQ information we have provided a link to the PTC Technical Support FAQ article for your reference at the bottom of this post.

Frequently Asked Questions:

• What is Performance Advisor for PTC Windchill?
  • Performance Advisor for PTC Windchill is a ThingWorx powered Dashboard which gives PTC Windchill customers an aggregated view on PTC Diagnostic data from their PTC Windchill installation(s).
  • Performance Advisor for PTC Windchill helps to increase product development operational productivity, lower product development costs, and lower the cost of IT by proactively detecting performance issues.
  • In the initial release Performance Advisor for PTC Windchill is intended to support the monitoring of usage and general system characteristics.  Future releases plan on adding additional issue reporting and diagnostic capabilities.
  • The Dashboard contains multiple gadgets with additional drill down capabilities. Find detailed descriptions of each gadget in the following articles
• What data is collected by Performance Advisor for PTC Windchill?
  • For information on the type of data that is collected (sent) to Performance Advisor refer to the Help Center
• What is the difference between the Performance Advisor for PTC Windchill and PTC System Monitor (PSM)?
  • PTC System Monitor (PSM) powered by Dynatrace production edition is an application monitoring solution  for PTC products.
  • In the future data gathered through PSM will be incorporated into Performance Advisor for PTC Windchill to provide richer reporting and recommendation capabilities.
• How does the Performance Advisor for PTC Windchill measure license usage?
  • Starting with PTC Windchill release 11.0, a new license reporting service was introduced which measures license usage for each of the following license types:
    • PTC Windchill PDMLink
    • PTC Windchill ProjectLink
    • View and Print Only
  • The license usage data is persisted within Windchill for each user on a daily basis and grouped by license type.
  • The option to send License Usage Reports and the frequency, can be set through the Performance Advisor for PTC Windchill utilities page under SiteUtilities by enabling the License Usage Reports Category
  • UserIDs contained within the report are hashed using UUID version 5 prior to sending data to PTC.
  • For more information on the License reporting service read the License Types section of the Windchill Help Center.
• Does PTC sell or share my information with third parties?
  • It is PTC's policy to never sell your information to list brokers or similar entities for commercial gain.
  • Collected Data is covered by the PTC Privacy Policy
• How can I control what to send and when to send it?
  • Basic product information is always sent to PTC.  However, some additional data is optional and can be configured by the customer Note, that omitting such information will limit the capabilities that the Performance Advisor can provide.
  • For more information on configuring data to be sent via the Performance Advisor for PTC Winchill  see the following topic available from the Windchill Help Center available here.
• Can a customer add additional data sources to the stream to be presented in the dashboard?
  • Not part of current functionality for Performance Advisor for PTC Windchill
  • To request a change in the functionality, refer to Product Ideas @ PTC Community
• Is there a way to review data which will be sent by Performance Advisor?
  • Prior to opting into Performance Advisor the Windchill Administrator has the ability to generate a report of all the data which would be sent by PTC through the Performance Advisor for PTC Windchill utilities page under Site>Utilities
  • All data which is sent to PTC can also be reviewed at any point as a copy of the data is retained in <Windchill Loadpoint>\utilities\PerformanceAdvisor\Reports
• How will PTC notify customers when there are changes to what is collected by Performance Advisor for PTC Windchill?
  • Changes will be documented in the What’s New documentation provided with future Windchill releases. In addition, the Performance Advisor for PTC Windchill Utility provides information on available data that can be collected.
• How can I display user names instead of UUIDs?
  • Currently it is not possible to display Usernames in PTC Performance Advisor dashboard due to privacy reasons.
• Who can see my data in the dashboard?
  • Customer Web account must have active entitlement for Windchill
• Can all users see the dashboard?
  • No, the dashboard is accessed through eSupport Portal authentication and active Windchill SCN paired with ‘Support Admin’ privileges for a given user.
• Will Performance Advisor for PTC Windchill work on a network, not connected to the Internet?
  • No.  Performance Advisor for PTC Windchill requires an internet connection in order to periodically push information to PTC.   The Windchill administrator can control how frequently reports are generated and sent to PTC.
• How is information encrypted to be kept safe and private?
  • The connection is made over SSL (Port 443)
  • Typical server-security should be employed. Specifically, the data is written to the directory located at: %WNC_HOME%\utilities\PerformanceAdvisor\Reports.
  • Access to this directory would give access to files that contains all collected data
  • Once sent to PTC, the Data resides on a set of PTC-Onsite servers where it is hosted and processed. The server’s security is rigorously controlled with limited access.
• Is there a performance impact on PTC Windchill by enabling Performance Advisor for PTC Windchill?
  • The process for gathering and sending data to PTC runs as an asynchronous background process through the commonScheduleQueue having negligible impact to performance of the Windchill server.
• What releases and datecodes are supported for use with Performance Advisor for PTC Windchill?
  • PTC Windchill 11.0 F000 (and later)
  • With future plans to support Windchill release 10.2 M020 and M030.
• How can I  get assistance with  Performance Advisor for PTC Windchill?
  • Access the PTC Community site for Performance Advisor for PTC Windchill to get help or provide feedback on product improvements.
• What data and how is data anonymized?
  • User ID is anonymized on the server prior to sending.
  • These anonymized IDs are created using a keyless Hash algorithm that cannot be decrypted by PTC.
  • Note: in the initial release some diagnostic data generated by random events (ex. error messages) may contain User ID and other business related information which is not anonymized.
  • Anonymization of such information is planned for a future release of the Performance Advisor for PTC Windchill.
  • For more information please see Help Center topic Performance Advisor for PTC Windchill Report Information.
• Is there a security and privacy document that can be reviewed by IT and legal departments?
  • Please refer to CS205579 for details on security and privacy.

Please check for updates in the original TS Article: https://support.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=CS226497