Attend one of the upcoming System z technical summits

In June IBM will be holding two System z technical summits, one in San Francisco on June 12th, and another in Chicago on June 18th. 

The System z technical summits will have multiple technical tracks, and will cover a wide range of topics inclduing the following:

Updating application infrastructures to expose business logic

Running business analytics on System z for faster access to transactional data

Low-cost provisioning of the secure private cloud

Dramatic performance and CPU improvements in the newest DB2 technology

Extending the reach of IMS™ assets by enabling new web services

Gaining capacity through the scalability enhancements of CICS

Reducing complexity in the data center while enabling multi-platform development

There will be a wide variety of speakers from IBM.  If you are interested in System z, then this is probably an event you will be interested in.

To attend either the San Francisco or Chicago event, here is a link to sign up:

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/os/systemz/summit/index.html

OMEGAMON Security considerations for ITM 6.3

IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM) 6.3 has been available for a while now.   (If you are interested in what is available with ITM 6.3, here is a link  http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/tivihelp/v61r1/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.itm.doc_6.3%2Fic%2Fitmic_newversion63.htm).

From a pure OMEGAMON and z/OS perspective, ITM 6.3 may not offer that much in terms of new function.  One area of impact is in the area of Tivoli Enterprise Portal (TEP) security.  With ITM 6.3 automation commands, such as Take Action, situation-driven reflex actions, tacmd executeCommand, and Policy Workflow commands, may operate in a more secure manner.  ITM 6.3 offers the ability do such things as capture detailed audit information about every ITM command request, and to reject any command that comes from an untrusted source. This is important to be aware of, in particular if you are using commands embedded in situations or doing anything of significance with Take Action in the TEP.

If you want a more thorough understanding of the new security considerations, here's a link to a good write-up that covers it in detail:
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27038508&myns=swgtiv&mynp=OCSSZ8F3&mync=R

A new fix for the Service Level Analysis (SLA) feature of OMEGAMON CICS

Service Level Analysis (SLA) is a nice feature of OMEGAMON CICS that breaks down and analyzes CICS workload, and shows % wait type information for that workload.  Looking at SLA can give you insight into where CICS workload bottlenecks may exist. 

Here's an example of OMEGAMON CICS SLA information.  In the example you see a variety of wait %s, including wait for using CPU, wait for DB2 and DL/I databases, wait for MRO, transient data temp storage I/O, and more.

As the panel header implies, OMEGAMON CICS SLA is gathered at the CICSplex level.  But, what if you want to collect information for some CICS regions in the CICSplex and not for others?  An OMEGAMON CICS collector task may collect information for many CICS regions on a given LPAR.

You can look at OA42104 to see that there is now a fix to provide that granularity and control. You can now collect SLA  information only for the regions you are interested in.  Here's a link for more information:
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg1OA42104&myns=swgtiv&mynp=OCSSLSDR&mync=R#more

A interesting technote on RMF and OMEGAMON Storage

I was just perusing through some technical notes and ran into a brief writeup on OMEGAMON Storage and its interplay with RMF.  The bottom line is OMEGAMON Storage collects its device information from RMF (among other places).  As part of the collection setup you may specify a collection interval which can control how often information is gathered and potentially stored by the tool. 

One of the options for the collection interval is RMF, whch means the tool will collect by default on the same interval as RMF.  If your RMF interval is something like 15 minutes (common in many shops), then this will usually work fine.  However, if you you have a smaller RMF interval, then you may want to apply some more thought to the collection interval.  Collecting on a narrower interval, and therefore more frequently may result in more collection overhead.

Here's a link to the note:
 http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21636603&myns=swgtiv&mynp=OCSS2JFP&mync=R

More on adding navigation options in e3270ui user interface

I showed you in a prior post how to add drill down navigation to a field or a set of fields on an e3270ui panel.  Now the next step is what if you want to add more options to a navigation popup on a panel?  Well, that's easy to modify too. 

In the panel code, when you have a popup defined you will see lines that show ACTION=  and then will reference the panel to navigate to.  You want to add an additional destination in the popup?  Just add another ACTION= option.  A popup can have up to 16 action options. 

Below is an example of a panel that has been customized to add some additional ACTION= options.

In the example you see the KEYCOLS statement, and then after that you see the ACTION= statement.  Each ACTION= shows the character you would use to select, the text that appears in the popup and the destination panel.  The ACTION= that are highlighted with arrows are the ones that have been added to the panel.

With the addtion of the additional ACTION= statements the panel changes as below.


The net is that by adding a statement you can easily add more navigation options.  In the example there have been several options added to the popup.

Upcoming webcast on System z storage management

On May 16th there will be a webcast on System z storage management.  Kevin Hosozawa of IBM will be talking about "Enhanced System z Storage Management with improved visibility and reporting".

Topics discussed in the presentation will include the following:

- Protect data for integrated catalog facility (ICF) catalogs

- Prevent and recover from costly space-related abends
- Audit and automatically correct errors in the DFSMS environment
- Improve efficiency and reduce the cost of the DFSMS hierarchical storage management (HSM) environment

The webcast will happen tomorrow, May 16th, at 11 AM Eastern Time.  If you are interested in attending, here's a link to register:
http://ibm.co/ZzZjR4

Adding navigation to your e3270ui panels

A major advantage of the new e3270ui is ease of use and flexibility of navigation.  The e3270ui is, in essence, a 3270 based portal for performance management information.  It can be very easy to navigate from place to place once logged on to the e3270ui. 

What's also compelling is that you can easily incorporate this navigation into your panels with some very minimal changes.  So you don't like how you have to drill down through a series of popups or panels to get to a certain level of detail?  No problem.  Just add zoom column support where you need it and you are done.  The ZOOMCOLS function is nice because it's easy to add to an existing panel and can be just a one line change to add what you need.

Let's look at an example of ZOOMCOLS and how it functions.  Below we see the default KIPHLTI OMEGAMON IMS System Health panel.  This is a nice little overview panel that shows some key IMS status metrics such as queueing, CPU usage, paging, etc. 

From here it would be nice to add zoom support so that you can zoom in directly for more detail without having to navigate through multiple popups and panels.  Instead you could just position your cursor on the number of interest and press enter.

Here's how you can add the ZOOMCOLS parm to the panel code to add the navigation.

In the above example I've made a copy of the KIPHLTI panel member and edited it in hilev.UKANWENU.  If you look for the DISPLAYCOLS statement, that statement lists what information appears on the panel.  After all the DISPLAYCOLS are listed, you can add the ZOOMCOLS parameter.  In the ZOOMCOLS parameter you list the column name, and then specify the zoom destination panel.  Note in the example, you can have different zoom destination panels for different columns.

Now you get navigation such as below, simply by adding the one ZOOMCOLS parameter to the panel.  Note how when ZOOMCOLS is added the numbers in the column appear as white versus light blue.  You position the cursor on the number and press enter to zoom.