Upcoming hands on Proof of Technology events for zScala

If you are interested in learning more about analytics, and more about IBM's offerings in that area specific to z/OS management, there will be a set of Proof of Technology events coming next month.  A Proof of Technology event lets you take the technology for a test drive in a live running environment.

There are two events coming in June.  The first is June 18th in downtown Minneapolis, and the second will be June 25th in downtown Chicago.  This is a free event, and IBM will provide lunch.

If you are interested in attending, please email my colleague, Lih Wang, at    lihwang@us.ibm.com

Enhanced 3270 UI enables unique integrated monitoring views

One of the advantages of moving to the enhanced 3270 UI is its ability to allow you to create unique monitoring views.  Once you get used to the panel language, panel creation is a fairly easy process.  It's also easy to customize existing panels.

You can also create custom panels, such as the following, that allow you to integrate monitoring information from multiple sources onto a single panel.  It takes some additional setup and coding, but it's not that hard to create.

In the example I show a panel focused on monitoring a DBCTL environment.   DBCTL involves the interaction of CICS and IMS, so it's nice to have information from both monitoring sources pulled together.  This particular panel pulls in region and service level information from OMEGAMON CICS, as well as thread performance, bottleneck and lock conflict data from OMEGAMON IMS, all to a single screen.

In subsequent posts I will go through how I created this screen.

Using zScala (SmartCloud Analytics Log Analysis) for DB2 message analysis

zScala (SmartCloud Analytics Log Analysis) is a tool for doing the analysis of messages coming from a variety of sources (z/OS and non-z/OS sources).  zScala also offers a customizable dashboard facility where you can summarize and aggregate message information across systems and LPARs. 

The example below shows an example of a dashboard for DB2 message analysis across 2 LPARs, MVSE and MVSF.  From the dashboard you may drill down to see message detail for specific time interval or message type.

OMEGAMON DB2 V5.20 added a nice DSNZPARM display to e3270ui

Among the various enhancements when OMEGAMON DB2 V5.20 became GA a few months back was an enhancement in the e3270ui to show the various DB2 subsystem DSNZPARM settings.  The layout of the display is nice in that the various zparms may be listed by category, or you may opt to see that all on a single panel.  Note the tab options on the panel that control the navigation.  OMEGAMON DB2 V5.20 makes use of this tab feature in a couple places.