Getting a handle on your System z environment

Something has just crashed. Everything seemingly was working fine until just recently. Now things are not so fine. What's the first question people usually ask? How about "what's changed"?

What's changed is often the million dollar question because, let's face it, in most shops System z is well managed and quite stable. When all around me is suddenly crashing down, the first thing I will often wonder is what changed and who made that change (and better yet, how to put things back).

IBM Tivoli is never at a loss for acronyms. One you may not have heard of before is TADDM. What's TADDM? It stands for Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager. What TADDM does is it goes out and dynamically discovers resources and components in your environment, and map these resources. TADDM output can be used for a variety of functions, including as input to a CMDB (Configuration Management DB) and as input to build application views in TBSM. But, one of the more interesting features of TADDM is it's ability to track and highlight system changes. Did something change? TADDM can show you the differences.

TADDM has components for both distributed and z environments. On System z TADDM can go out and map at different levels of discovery, including looking at such things as z/OS Parmlib information.

While I would not suggest that TADDM is a tool for change control, TADDM can be a tool to help you get a handle on what's on your system, what's talking to what, and what if anything has changed.

If you want more information on TADDM, here is a link:

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/taddm/