Some notes on OSA monitoring information in OMEGAMON Mainframe Networks

The OSA (Open Systems Adapter) is a network controller that you can install in a mainframe I/O cage. The adapter integrates several hardware features and supports many networking transport protocols.

OMEGAMON XE For Mainframe Networks provides quite a bit of information on OSA adapters, adapter status, and throughput statistics.  OMEGAMON will show such things as the adapter type, status, processor utilization (including rates calculated across various time intervals), LPARs connected, many various packet sent/received counts, and many various errors (such as collisions, CRC errors, sequence errors, fragmentation errors, alignment errors). 

While there are tools other than OMEGAMON that can be used to display much of this information in real time, OMEGAMON provides the added value of being able to display and analyze this information in a historical context.  Rates, utilization, and error activity can be analyzed and trended over time to determine
the potential for issues down the road.  And keep in mind that this history can be leveraged within the Tivoli Data Warehouse for even longer term analysis.

The example screen shots show some of the product provided screens, including a real time view of OSA activity, and historical 24 hour plot charts of performance.