OMEGAMON Storage - User DASD Groups

OMEGAMON XE For Storage has many collection options for gathering DASD performance and space management information. User DASD groups are one option I find most interesting in that it gives the user considerable flexibility in terms of how DASD data is gathered and displayed. This flexibility is useful in terms of being able to control the cost of DASD monitoring.

A user DASD group is a user-defined logical grouping of DASD volumes related according to specific criteria. You can define a user DASD group based on volume name, device address, SMS storage group, or one or more aspects of the DASD device (examples include fragmentation index and MSR time). Once the user DASD group is defined, you can use the User DASD Group Performance and User DASD Group Space workspaces to view aggregated performance and space metrics for the group.

User DASD groups can be defined in a couple ways. One is via member hilev.RKANPARU(KDFDUDGI). The KDFDUDGI member allows for the definition of a group based on volume, a range of devices, or SMS storage group name.

Another way to create a user DASD group is via the Tivoli Portal (assuming V4.20 Interim Feature 2 is installed). In the TEP select the User DASD Groups Performance node on the navigation tree, right-click any row on the table view, and select Add Group from the menu. As before, the user may specify constraints by volume, device address, device range, SMS storage group, or volume attribute. There is also an attributes tab to specify the attribute constraints that are used in conjunction with the DASD device constraints specified. There is a drop-down list in the attribute column to specify the attribute information to be used.

I like user DASD groups because it provides a way to control monitoring options for various types of devices. Device architecture and usage varies in many enterprises. Being able to group devices makes the analysis more meaningful for a given environment.