Upcoming webcast on NetView and zEnterprise

On September 30, 2010 at 11 AM, Eastern time, there will be a webcast titled "Tivoli NetView for z/OS in zEnterprise".

In this complimentary teleconference you can learn how IBM Tivoli NetView for z/OS addresses critical issues, including complexity, by providing the foundation for consolidating and integrating key service management processes in your zEnterprise environment. You’ll see how Tivoli’s NetView for z/OS-based integrated solutions can help you deliver value by improving the availability and resiliency of zEnterprise systems and applications, reduce the need for operator intervention, and fine-tune service delivery. With less unplanned downtime, there’s less impact on your business.

The speakers are Mark Edwards, Senior Product Manager, IBM Software Group and Larry Green, NetView for z/OS Architect, IBM Software Group.

Here is a link to sign up for the event:

http://www.ibm.com/software/os/systemz/telecon/30sep/index.html?S_TACT=100GV43M&S_CMP=5x5

Leveraging the Situation Console

The Situation Event Console will show the situations open in a given monitoring environment, and provide drill downs for details on the situation alert. By default, the Situation Console is provided for the entire enterprise on the product provided Enterprise workspace.

What's nice is you can implicitly filter and optimize the Situation Event Console for your specific requirements, and the types of alerts you need to see. In this example I made a change to the product provided DB2 Messages workspace. I split the top DB2 message window, and then did a click and drag from the tool bar, and dropped the Situation Event Console icon on the DB2 workspace I'm editing. The result is now I have a Situation Event Console filtered for just DB2 alerts. You can do the same thing, for other managed system types, as well. This technique is an easy way to tune out the noise, and target the information you are most interested in when it comes to situation alerts.

OMEGAMON DB2 Messages Workspace

OMEGAMON DB2 V4.1 added support for DB2 message logging and management to the Tivoli Portal as an interim feature. The DB2 message feature has some interesting and useful capabilities, such as highlighting application failure/abend messages and tracking Deadlock/timeout/escalation messages. The default workspace will show the last 10 messages, and will highlight typical problem messages. But, as with any Tivoli Portal workspace, you can easily customize the workspace to your specific requirements.

Another nice usage of the DB2 Messages workspace is the ability to create situations based upon DB2 messages. In the example I show here I created an alert based upon a DSNL027I message. Notice also that you can take advantage of the ability to highlight information, such as for the DSN3201I error message.

If you want to try out the DB2 Messages feature, but do not see any messages appearing in the workspace, check on the following command:

F cccccccc,F PESERVER,F db2ssid,DB2MSGMON=Y

where ccccccc is the OM DB2 collector task, DB2 ID would be the DB2 you want to collect messages from.

The above modify will enable message collection to occur, and you should be able to see data in the workspace.

About Policies

Policies are an interesting and powerful feature of the Tivoli Enterprise Portal. Common usages of policies include such things as enabling a situation to issue multiple commands when true, stopping and starting situations as needed, and using multiple checks and command options with a single command flow. Policies provide a way to expand the command capabilities of the Tivoli Portal.

There are some things to consider when using policies. First, be aware that situations that are embedded within the policy logic are 'copies' of the original situation. In other words, if you take a commonly used situation and embed it within a policy, that situation logic will be run twice, once for the situation itself, and once for the policy. That, in and of itself, may not be a problem. But, be aware that if you are using a higher cost situation in a policy, you will be using that higher cost situation twice. Second, situations usually run within the agent task, but policies run within the TEMS infrastructure. Third, similar to the interval concept of situations, policies also have an inherent loop execution logic.

To know if any policies are connected to a given managed system, you can right click on the managed system within the Tivoli Portal and select 'Manage policies' to see what policies have been deployed.

Upcoming webcast on OMEGAMON installation and troubleshooting

On September 14th there will be a webcast on "IBM Tivoli OMEGAMON® XE for z/OS from Installation to Troubleshooting – PART1". This webcast will cover the following:

Omegamon XE for zOS:Installation and Configuration
Omegamon XE for zOS:Usage
Omegamon XE for zOS:Troubleshooting

Here is a link for more information on the event:

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27019462&myns=swgtiv&mynp=OCSS2JNN&mync=R

More on OMEGAMON z/OS currency maintenance

While browsing through my Google reader I noticed an entry titiled "ABENDs after upgrading level of z/OS". The symptom is various ABENDs (i.e. S0C1, S0C4, U0012, U1213, etc.) in the TEMS or in any of the OMEGAMON agents after upgrading your level of z/OS.

The bottom line is when you upgrade your level of z/OS, you need to be sure to apply OMEGAMON Currency PTFs to support that new level of z/OS, AND (let's not forget the AND) OMEGAMON Currency PTFs for any level of z/OS you skipped over. If you skip a level of z/OS (i.e. upgrade from z/OS 1.9 to z/OS 1.11), you need to apply the OMEGAMON Currency PTFs for the level(s) you skipped as well as the level to which you upgraded.

Here is a link to the document, and the document in turn includes links to recommended maintenance levels for z/OS 1.10, 1.11, and 1.12.

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21439161&myns=swgtiv&mynp=OCSS2JNN&mync=R

Using ITMSUPER to understand the cost of situation processing

ITMSUPER is an excellent tool that can provide tremendous insight into what is happening in the IBM Tivoli monitoring infrastructure. ITMSUPER is available from the OPAL web site (see the link to OPAL on the right of this page). OPAL is a good source of handy tools and other goodies. ITMSUPER is one of the most useful.

There are many uses for ITMSUPER, analyzing situation processing is just one. In the example I show some of the typical output from ITMSUPER. I clicked on the line in the middle of the display "Cost of running situations". This display shows information on what situations are running within the given agent (TEMA) task. Note that the display also provides information on the situation interval, number of rows processed for the situation, and a relative cost of running the situation per hour. This is very good information to use to determine which situations are potentially more costly to run than others.

Upcoming webcast on z/OS storage management

On August 19th there will be a webcast on "IBM Tivoli System z Storage Management update: An integrated toolset for better insight, analysis and control".

This event will cover the IBM Tivoli storage management suite of solutions. In this session, examples to be discussed will include: how to pinpoint a critical address space not performing well and in real time and identify all the data sets and devices that the address space is using, reveal hidden errors in HSM control data sets that can result in data not being backed up and being unavailable when needed, maintenance of ICF catalogs to avoid costly downtime, and optimization of your environment with policy-based control over DASD allocation.

The webcast is a free event. Here is the URL to sign up:

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/os/systemz/telecon/19aug/index.html?S_TACT=100GV41M&S_CMP=5x5

OMEGAMON XE For IMS Transaction Reporting Facility overhead considerations

The Transaction Reporting Facility (TRF) component of OMEGAMON XE For IMS is used to create information needed for chargeback and IMS performance analysis. There can be overhead considerations when enabling Transaction Reporting Facility. The following APAR, OA33784, mentions overhead considerations when the DB2 collection option is enabled. Specifically, if the user is running BMPs, there will be additional TRF overhead for the DB2 collection portion, whether the BMP option is set to ON or OFF.

If you are running TRF you will want to take a look at this APAR:

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg1OA33784&myns=swgtiv&mynp=OCSSXS8U&mync=R#more

OMEGAMON currency maintenance for z/OS 1.12

OMEGAMON currency support for z/OS 1.12 is being provided for both OMEGAMON Versions 410, 420 as well as later releases of OMEGAMON XE products on z/OS.

To have currency for z/OS 1.12, you will need to be fairly current on maintenance. Also, there will be maintenance that applies to common code shared across multiple OMEGAMON tools.

For a link to information on the recommended maintenance for z/OS 1.12:

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21429049&myns=swgtiv&mynp=OCSSRJ25&mynp=OCSS8RV9&mynp=OCSSRMRD&mynp=OCSS2JNN&mynp=OCSS2JFP&mynp=OCSS2JL7&mync=R

Also, here is a link to a forum if you have questions: https://www.ibm.com/technologyconnect/pip/listforums.wss?linkid=1j3000

Situations and their impact on the cost of monitoring

Situations can have an impact on the resource usage of the OMEGAMON agent (TEMA) tasks.

Referring back to an earlier post, I mentioned the notion of the more I do, the more it will likely cost. The more data I request and the more data I store and/or act on, the will result often times be a higher cost of collection, and potentially greater overhead. The more alerts, the more information I alert on, the more rows of information I potentially alert on, and the larger the number of managed systems I alert on, the result will potentially be a higher cost of alerting. This cost of alerting will often be seen in places such as the TEMA address space.

To easily see how situation processing is impacting a managed system, from the Tivoli Portal you can right click on a managed system and select 'Manage Situations' (see the example). The pop-up that you get will show what situations are distributed to the managed system, plus some other very interesting information about the situations.

There is some very interesting information that this pop-up shows, as well. One column shows the interval that the situation executes on. The tighter the interval, the more work the TEMA has to do to handle the situation. Notice also, that there are several different intervals for the situation. Many of them are running on a 30 second interval, others on 1 minute, others on different intervals. One thing to be aware of is situation optimization. If you have multiple situations referencing the same table of information, the Tivoli infrastructure has the ability to optimize the situation checks, by doing one check versus multiple. However, this will work only if the situations are on the same interval.

Another apsect of situation optimization, is that if a situation that has 'Take Action', it is not eligible for this optimization. If you have many situations with 'Take Action', this will potentially significantly reduce the potential benefit of this function. One suggestion is, if you have a component such as OMNIBus, to consider using the EIF interface, versus 'Take Action' to drive alert notification. Using the EIF option will not inhibit situation optimization.