New capability for the z/OS Event Pump

The Event Pump for z/OS is an IBM tool that enables the integration and forwarding of z/OS events from z/OS to IBM Netcool OMNIbus. The Event Pump can pass event information, plus resource status, and the severity of an event to OMNIbus. The mechanism is very similar to how OMEGAMON XE uses the EIF interface to pass alerts to OMNIbus.

There is one APAR of interest that just became available last week, OA34085. This particular APAR enables the integration of BMC Mainview alerts into the Event Pump. So the bottom line is, if you are BMc Mainview customer, and you have IBM OMNIbus for event management, you can now more easily forward alerts and events from Mainview into OMNIbus.

For more information, here is a URL:
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg1OA34085&myns=swgtiv&mynp=OCSSXTW7&mync=R

Tips on customizing "Take Action" in the Tivoli Portal

The "Take Action" function in the Tivoli Portal (TEP) can be very useful. One of the nice things about "Take Action" is that it is very flexible and customizable. You can easily set up a pre-arranged set of commands and then select the desired command from a drop down list. One thing that makes "Take Action" flexible is the ability to use the attribute substitution function as part of the command definition. What this means is that you can have the Action command insert an attribute where needed to customize the command to be submitted. Here is an example of how you can use this function, in this example to set up a DB2 Thread Cancel function.

Webcast on "Monitoring Options in OMEGAMON XE for Messaging"

There will be a free webcast on October 7th on "Monitoring Options in OMEGAMON XE for Messaging" . The time will be 11 a.m., Eastern Daylight Time, 3:00 p.m. GMT.

The teleconference will discuss monitoring options to efficiently detect and identify root causes of your WebSphere MQ and Message Broker performance issues.

Here is a link to sign up for the event:
http://www.ibm.com/software/systemz/telecon/7oct/

z/OS 1.12 available shortly

z/OS Version 1 Release 12 will be ready for ordering as of Friday, September 24th.

z/OS V1.12 can provide automatic and real time capabilities for higher performance, as well as fewer system disruptions and response time impacts to z/OS and the business applications that rely on z/OS.

Interesting "new stuff" includes new VSAM Control Area (CA) Reclaim capability, a new z/OS Runtime Diagnostics function is designed to quickly look at the system message log and address space resources and can help you identify sources of possible problems, z/OS Predictive Failure Analysis (PFA) for managing SMF, performance improvements for many workloads, XML enhancements, networking improvements, and improved productivity with the new face of z/OS called the z/OS Management Facility (5655-S28).

Here is a link for more information on z/OS V1.12:

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/zos/

A new photonic chip

While this does not have anything to do specific to z/OS or Tivoli, I thought it was an interesting read in Financial Times.

"A new photonic chip that works on light rather than electricity has been built by an international research team, paving the way for the production of ultra-fast quantum computers with capabilities far beyond today’s devices."

Sounds like an interesting breakthrough. Here's a link to the story:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8c0a68b0-c1bc-11df-9d90-00144feab49a.html

OMEGAMON XE For Storage V4.20 Interim Feature 3 enhancements

OMEGAMON XE For Storage V4.20 Interim Feature 3 has some interesting new enhancements. Some of these enhancements include the following:

DFSMShsm Common Recall Queue support
Display request info for all queued and active requests in the CRQPlex on a single workspace
Enable cancelling HSM requests from the CRQPlex Request workspace - even across systems
Provide Storage Groups and User DASD Groups space used stats in units of tracks and cylinders Multi-volume datasets now displayed as single entity in the Dataset Attribute Database reports Reports will now contain a column indicating whether a dataset is multi-volume or not
For a multi-volume datasets, space data will be summarized in a single row
Ability to identify TotalStorage array problems at the ranklevel
Situation alerts for DDM Throttling, Raid Degraded condition and RPM Exceptions
Support for issuing Storage Toolkit commands at a group level

If you have OMEGAMON Storage, here is a link for more info:
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg24027743&myns=swgtiv&mynp=OCSS2JFP&mync=R

Getting started using ITMSUPER

I've done some earlier posts on using ITMSUPER, and some of the useful information that is contained within ITMSUPER. ITMSUPER is a very useful utility that is easy to use, and provides quite a bit of diagnostic information as to what is happening within your Tivoli monitoring infrastructure.

Here is a link to a brief "Getting started using ITMSUPER". This procedure includes a link to where you can go to get ITMSUPER.

Here's the link:
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21444266&myns=swgtiv&mynp=OCSSZ8F3&mync=R

Take advantage of snapshot history in OMEGAMON DB2

OMEGAMON DB2 has a very useful snapshot hsitory feature that is very granular and detailed. This particular history mechanism is different than the snapshot hsitory collected by the XE agent task for Tivoli Data Warehouse (TDW) history collection. The OMEGAMON DB2 snapshot hsitory can be collected on a frequent basis, provides considerable information, and is very useful for problem analysis. To access the OMEGAMON DB2 snapshot history, you need to enable and install the PE GUI interface (and yes you have access to this tool regardless of whether you run the PM or PE version of the product).

The example I have here shows how you can use the tool. Here I show two different views of DB2 active threads. The top one is from the current view, and the other is from several minutes prior. To change the history view you move the scroll bar I have highlighted. What's neat is you can easily move the scroll bar back and forth to get different point in time views of the system.

This feature is very useful, in particular for analyzing those problem scenarios where being able to go back in time and see the mix of applications running at the same time is key to understanding what is going on.