Performance Advisor for PTC Windchill - Observations

This document is a collection of random observations about the behavior of the new Performance Advisor for PTC Windchill.  It is meant to help other system administrators understand how the tool functions.  These observations are taken directly from the different Windchill systems I maintain.  This document is not mean to supersede or contradict any official information from PTC.

Part 1 - Validation Tab

1. You must enter both your SCN and your ptc.com credentials in order to successfully validate your SCN.  Yes, the message says you shouldn't have to do this if you know your SCN, but the tool refuses to validate without the user account info present.
   

    

2. Validating the SCN adds a new property to the system (or updates the existing one if already present) called "wt.support.scn".  It sets this property equal to the value entered above for the SCN.  This property is added to site.xconf and then propagated to wt.properties.  (Technically the propagation updates the time/date stamps of ALL the properties files.)

    

   <Property name="wt.support.scn" overridable="true" targetFile="codebase/wt.properties" value="XXXXXXX"/>

Part 2 - Settings Tab

1. Changing the "Do you want to ... send data to PTC" option changes a system preference named "/phoneHome/optInOut".  The actual value is stored in the PreferenceInstancedatabase table and is set to either "true" or "false".

    

2. The table settings for "Frequency" and "Enabled" are both stored in the database table WAReportConfiguration.

    

3. Executing the "Save Settings" button will verify the data in both the PreferenceInstance table and the WAReportConfiguration table and only update what changed.