IntelliMagic Vision Support for Hitachi VSP SMF Records from Mainframe Analytics Recorder
Gain New Health Insights into VSP 5000 series and VSP F/G1x00 SMF Records
The Hitachi Virtual Storage Platforms VSP 5000 series and VSP F/G1x00 are able to report detailed internal performance information to the mainframe.
This whitepaper demonstrates how you can gain critical insights into the health of the storage systems through IntelliMagic Vision by using the SMF records created by the Hitachi Mainframe Analytics Recorder.
To download this white paper, please complete the form to the right, and we will send the file to your email.
Top ‘IntelliMagic zAcademy’ Webinars of 2023
As year-end approaches I wanted to continue the tradition of looking back on the IntelliMagic zAcademy webinars that resonated most with our mainframe audience.
Since 2020, IntelliMagic zAcademy has offered free, educational z/OS webinars to the mainframe community. In 2023, we reached our 50th zAcademy webinar and covered topics from Mainframe Cost Savings to extracting insights from MQ data, mainframe security through zERT, application performance, and much more. But a top-5 countdown list can only have five.
The Top 5 IntelliMagic zAcademy webinars of 2023, as determined by total registration and attendance numbers, are:
(Honorable Mention) Metro Global Mirror (MGM) Monitoring in GDPS Sites
Okay, I’m going to cheat just a little here. Just narrowly escaping the top 5, was this session where IBM legend Joe Hyde offered practical advice on monitoring the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and the factors influencing it.
While GDPS automation provides local storage resiliency and remote failover capabilities, it is the customer’s responsibility to supply adequate hardware infrastructure aligned with their business needs, especially concerning data recency at the remote site in case of a failure.
By monitoring performance data, participants can gain assurance that business requirements are met and can proactively make changes if issues arise, ensuring a resilient and optimized IT infrastructure.
#5) How Mainframe Performance Teams are Solving Their Skills Gap Challenges
Kicking off the actual top 5 list is a webinar that covered a topic on everyone’s mind: the mainframe skills gap. In this webinar, Brent Phillips and Todd Havekost discussed how several mainframe sites are addressing the imminent retirement of experienced mainframe personnel.
This recording is highly recommended for any and all sites experiencing the skills gap or trying to proactively avoid it.
#4) Where Are All The Performance Analysts? – A Mainframe Roundtable
Launching our foray into the ’roundtable’ business, our 4th most attended session of the year was truly a meeting of the minds. With the likes of Martin Packer, Frank Kyne, Dave Hutton, and Jim Horne joining IntelliMagic’s own Todd Havekost and John Baker, these guys touched on everything performance – from costs, to labor, how to speak to management, AI, and much more.
Getting a group of experts like this on a single call is truly and honor and spectacle so if you haven’t already, I highly recommend viewing or listening to the recording.
#3) From Taped Walls to Your PC: z/OS Configuration Made Simple
z/OS Performance and Configuration data is very useful for understanding complicated issues and solving problems, but sometimes it is hard to fully grasp what the data is showing us. Traditional methods of viewing and understanding our z/OS configuration often involved physically taping the mapped-out-topology to office walls – something not feasible or desirable in today’s massively complex environments.
In our third most viewed webinar of the year, John Ticic and Todd Havekost discussed and demonstrated a breakthrough new method of interpreting and interacting with the LPAR, FICON, and Sysplex topologies.
#2) Oh Where Performance Will Take You: A Mainframe Roundtable
Our second ever zAcademy Roundtable hosted the likes of Cheryl Watson and Craig Walters amongst a rockstar group of performance and capacity analysts. So there’s no surprise that this comes in at #2 on our list.
Moderated again by John Baker, this roundtable event explored the journey of several renown mainframe performance analysts and offered insights and perspectives on timeless topics.
Panelists included:
- Cheryl Watson, Watson & Walker
- Craig Walters, IBM
- Dave Barry, UPS
- Jon Ulrich, HCSC
- Todd Havekost, IntelliMagic
#1) Unraveling the z16: Understanding the Virtual Cache Architecture and Real-World Performance
By and far the #1 most viewed zAcademy session of 2023 (and all time) was this session presented by John Baker and Todd Havekost.
During this ground-breaking discussion, John and Todd discussed the revolutionary changes brought about by the z16 processor architecture, and walked through the results of numerous recent upgrade analysis’ with surprising results.
With the introduction of virtual cache at levels 2, 3, and 4, the z16 marks the most substantial transformation in the z processor architecture since the z13. For any site who is considering migrating to the z16 (or already has), this is truly a can’t miss session on what results you can likely expect and how you can verify you received (and are receiving) the expected results.
Looking Towards 2024
If you haven’t yet watched any of the live sessions or recordings of this year’s zAcademy sessions, or if you’re a super-learner that signs up for every session, remember that all zAcademy webinars and recordings – past and future – can be accessed at www.intellimagic.com/zacademy/
IntelliMagic zAcademy will continue into 2024 with exciting insights and deep dives into several new areas of the z/OS mainframe. If you have a favorite session you want to tell us about, have questions about any of the material you saw, or if you have a recommendation on a topic you want us to cover in the future, send us a note at info@intellimagic.com, and we’ll get back to you!
Thanks for watching – tune in next year!
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From Taped Walls to Your PC: z/OS Configuration Made Simple with Topology | IntelliMagic zAcademy
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From Taped Walls to Your PC: z/OS Configuration Made Simple with Topology | IntelliMagic zAcademy
Exploring Interactive Topology Visualizations from z/OS Configuration Data
Get Notified of Upcoming Webinars
z/OS Performance and Configuration data is very useful for understanding complicated issues and solving problems, but sometimes it is hard to fully grasp what the data is showing us. Traditional methods of viewing and understanding our z/OS configuration often involved physically taping the mapped-out-topology to office walls – something not feasible or desirable in today’s massively complex environments.
To keep up with the needs and demands of z/OS performance analysts, a new method of interpreting and interacting with the LPAR, FICON, and Sysplex topologies is necessary.
In this webinar, we explore one such method that combines numerous different data sources from z/OS and displays the data in an understandable, succinct, and interactive visual form. We explore how these views help us solve problems, improve efficiency, and ensure desired data replication requirements are being implemented.
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From Taped Walls to Your PC: z/OS Configuration Made Simple with Topology | IntelliMagic zAcademy
In this webinar, we explore a technique that integrates diverse data sources from z/OS, presenting them in a clear, concise, and interactive visual format.
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Banco do Brasil Ensures Availability for Billions of Daily Transactions with IntelliMagic Vision
Company Overview
Banco do Brasil, with over 87,000 employees, 5,000 branches, and 81 million customers, is one of the largest banks in the world, processing over 15 billion transactions per day. Headquartered in Brasilia, Brazil, Banco do Brasil provides commercial and government services as well as a large variety of consumer services, including bill payment services, ATM loans, and checking, savings, and investment accounts.
> 87,000 employees | > 5,000 branches | > 81 millions of customers | > 15 billion transaction per day |
The Challenge
As the second largest financial services company in Latin America, Banco do Brasil has one of the largest and most complex IT infrastructure environments in the world. As a publicly owned bank with billions of daily transactions and millions of customers, there is no margin for system downtime or application disruptions.
Previous solutions to manage performance and conduct capacity planning were cumbersome, slow, required manual coding, and were not interactive or easy to train new hires on. They needed a solution that would allow them to keep up with modern demands, rising transactions, and expanding data volumes.
The Solution
For more than a decade, Banco do Brasil has used IntelliMagic Vision to monitor and manage the performance and availability of their entire end-to-end z/OS and SAN infrastructure environments.
“We use IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS on a daily basis to investigate bottlenecks and analyze performance problems. We also use IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS to improve our system and storage designs and better understand our environment. IntelliMagic Vision has been extremely helpful in post-mortem analysis.”
– Fabio Pereira, Banco do Brasil, Storage Manager
Banco do Brasil uses IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS Systems, CICS, Db2, Disk & Replication, Virtual Tape, as well as SAN Storage, Fabric, and VMware.
IntelliMagic Vision also met the organization’s core requirements with its:
- Built-in health insights to proactively avoid disruptions
- Extensive drill down capabilities
- Code free report builder
- Capacity Planning
- Intuitive graphical user interface
Business Results
IntelliMagic Vision enabled Banco do Brasil to streamline its performance management and capacity planning and enhance its overall business operations.
With IntelliMagic Vision, Banco do Brasil was able to:
- Proactively highlight and prevent potential availability issues
- Eliminate redundant tooling and use a single interface across infrastructure areas
- Reduce mean-time-to-resolution for problems
- Enhance communication and cooperation amongst different teams
To learn more about how Banco do Brasil uses IntelliMagic Vision, view the full review on TrustRadius.
Book a Demo or Connect With an Expert
Discuss your technical or sales-related questions with our mainframe experts today
Unraveling the z16: Understanding the Virtual Cache Architecture and Real-World Performance | IntelliMagic zAcademy
Get Notified of Upcoming Webinars
With its introduction of virtual cache at levels 2, 3, and 4, the z16 represents the most significant change to the z processor architecture since the z13. The magnitude of these changes has understandably generated a great deal of curiosity into how this virtual cache approach operates conceptually and how it is actually performing at customer sites.
This webinar will provide detailed z16 insights, including:
- An overview of all key z16 advances
- A deep dive into the new cache architecture
- Key concepts to help you optimize your configuration
- Findings from numerous customer upgrades quantifying the extent to which z16s are delivering on their rated capacity
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In this webinar, we explore a technique that integrates diverse data sources from z/OS, presenting them in a clear, concise, and interactive visual format.
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This webinar will provide detailed z16 insights, including an overview of all key z16 advances and a deep dive into the new cache architecture.
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Discuss your technical or sales-related questions with our mainframe experts today
Metro Global Mirror (MGM) Monitoring in GDPS Sites | IntelliMagic zAcademy
IBM’s Metro Global Mirror was designed to run on its own regardless of how far in time the data at the remote site is compared to the primary site. GDPS automation provides storage resiliency at the local site and failover capability to the remote site, but the customer is responsible for providing enough hardware infrastructure to meet their business requirements, including data recency at the remote site, in case of failure.
Monitoring performance data can provide assurance that business requirements are met and allow for proactive changes if issues arise.
This webinar will provide practical advice about monitoring the recovery point objective (RPO) and factors affecting RPO.
Profiling zHyperLink Performance and Usage
Although zHyperLink has been available for several years now, many mainframe sites have yet to implement the technology into their production environment. In this blog, we’ll review one site’s recent production implementation of zHyperLink for reads, for Db2. We will provide examples of reporting at the PCIe adapter, volume level and data set level which you may find helpful to analyze your own results.
Introduction to zHyperLink
Over the years, there have been many significant advances in I/O technology. Today, I/O is really, really fast. So how can we gain further improvement? One approach is to take a subset of I/Os for data that resides in close proximity to the processor, add a new higher-speed link, and make them synchronous in order to avoid interrupt processing and task switching. This is what zHyperLink does.
Figure 1 shows the physical connectivity between the CPC and the Storage Control Unit.
zHyperLink provides a short distance direct connection of up to 150 meters. I/Os are synchronous, eliminating the overhead of z/OS dispatcher delays, I/O interrupt processing and processor cache reload. Latency improvements up to 4.5 times are possible with current hardware (z15s and DS8950Fs in this example). Think of 20 microsecond I/O times, as we’ll see below.
There is a CPU time price to be paid, since the I/Os are synchronous and the processor waits for them to complete. And there are limitations on which data sets and I/Os are eligible. However, the benefits outweigh the costs for most customers. If you need assistance analyzing your workloads for zHyperLink candidates and assessing the anticipated impacts, please contact us at IntelliMagic.
zHyperLink Connectivity Best Practices
Let’s look at data from a site who recently implemented zHyperLink and review the kinds of reports you can produce for your own analysis.
We’ll begin by verifying that our configuration adheres to best practices for connectivity. Figure 2 below shows a single LPAR and a single DS8950F subsystem. We see there are two Physical Channel IDs for PCIe, each with four PCIe Function IDs.
Per best practices, you should be configured this way throughout your environment – 4 PFIDs per LPAR per zHyperLink connection (CEC, adapter ID, port #). We can also see the even distribution of I/O across PFIDs and ports. Including your other LPARs would also allow you to identify the busier LPARs.
Profile zHyperLink Usage and Performance
Now let’s look at our mix of zHyperLink and FICON I/O to start to profile our usage and performance.
Total I/O Rate
Figure 3 shows I/O rates over the course of a single day, from midnight to midnight.
Most of the I/Os are native FICON as usual, but you now also see spikes of successful synchronous reads and some synchronous read cache misses. Note that only synchronous reads are currently enabled in this data, so no writes are shown.
Synchronous I/Os
Figure 4 examines the synchronous I/O without the native FICON, for easier visibility into patterns.
We see there are three main spikes of activity, at 0100, 0700 and 1600, with more than 10,000 synchronous I/Os at peak. We also see the read cache misses are a small percentage of the synchronous I/Os and follow the peaks, as you might expect. Read cache misses are re-driven as native FICON I/O which incurs overhead, so you’ll want to keep an eye on misses going forward.
Synchronous Latency
Figure 5 compares latency to I/O rate for the synchronous read requests.
The top red line shows latency, or response times, varying from 16-22 microseconds (way fast!) over the course of the day. The blue line of three peaks should look familiar by now, as the request rate. Note that as the request rate goes up, the response time comes down and is consistently under 20 microseconds.
Synchronous Read Hits
We can also report synchronous hits and misses by data set name. Figure 6 shows a daily summary by data set name, but you could display any of these over time as well.
This site turned on synchronous read processing for Db2, so we’re looking at the hit percentage for production Db2 data sets.
Time Pattern for Synchronous Requests
With any new implementation, it can be helpful to understand the time patterns that apply to the workload involved. Figure 7 shows that the single day we’ve been looking at is typical.
This Db2 workload drives most of its synchronous I/O in the 0100-0300 hours consistently, with little change by day of the week.
Data Set Level Performance
Another way to look at data set level performance is shown in Figure 8.
Figure 8 shows the top 30 linear data sets with ‘DBP1’ in their name, with response times and time of day when they were accessed. Reports like this, along with the related reporting in IntelliMagic Vision, provides a strong capability to profile your workload and understand technology benefits or diagnose problems or changes.
Demonstrating the Benefit of Improved Technology
zHyperLink utilizes improved technology including the PCIe bus and synchronous I/O to significantly improve latency for applications. This improvement can be shown explicitly from the RMF/SMF data and is key to justifying new technologies and new projects.
IntelliMagic Vision gives you an easy and comprehensive way to verify the benefit, not just for zHyperLink but for the many enhancements your teams implement each year.
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From Taped Walls to Your PC: z/OS Configuration Made Simple with Topology | IntelliMagic zAcademy
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Book a Demo or Connect With an Expert
Discuss your technical or sales-related questions with our mainframe experts today
What’s New with IBM DS8900F?
This blog was originally published on February 10, 2020.
IBM announced a code update to their all-flash, high-end storage array, the DS8900F, on August 11, 2020, and it became generally available in early September. This blog will take a closer look at what was announced and what it means.
The IBM DS8000 has been around for over 15 years. Over that time, the hardware and functionality has evolved and there have been frequent licensed internal code updates to support continuous enhancements. In August 2020, IBM announced Release 9.1 for their flagship DS8900F storage array, and it became available in September. Although there is nothing revolutionary in this release, there are quite a few product improvements that should be interesting and useful to any shop that either has DS8900F storage installed or is considering it.
Increased Cache and Capacity Flexibility
There are several hardware enhancements that this new code release enables. The top end DS8950F now supports cache sizes up to 3.4 TB, roughly 70% more than the previous maximum of 2 TB. Note that moving from 2 TB to 3.4 TB cache does not increase the size of the write cache (NVS) which is still capped at 128 GB.
The major potential benefit of the larger cache is to support more aggressive storage consolidation. For example, if you have three IBM DS8886 each with 1 TB of cache and you want to consolidate to a single IBM DS8950F, you might be hesitant if the maximum cache size were only 2 TB as the cache to backing storage ratio would be reduced. However, with the larger cache, this would no longer be a concern. Thus, there is little risk that the cache hit ratios for your critical workloads would be affected.
Another enhancement is support for 1.92 TB High Capacity Flash cards on the DS8950F, providing more capacity flexibility when planning your storage configuration.
Hardware Integration
With Release 9.1, the IBM DS8910F may now be integrated into the same rack as an IBM z15 T02/LT2. This will take up 16U of reserved space in the z15 rack. This is especially useful to customers that are seeking to reduce the physical footprint of their z/OS data center.
The release also supports a new Hardware Management Console (HMC) with added memory and storage that will ship with any new DS8900 orders. The new HMC is not necessary for any existing applications but may be required later to support future functionality.
Flash Drive and RAID Management
IBM incorporated an enhancement to Flash Drive and RAID Management as part of this release. In the past, freed, unallocated, or initialized space on RAID arrays had zeros written to them which can increase wear on Flash Storage.
Now, the space can be zeroed using an UNMAP command that returns free pages directly to the free capacity pool in the Flash Drive. This can improve the wear life and endurance of the flash cells and reduce overheads on the drive due to garbage collection and free page management.
Other enhancements have resulted in faster rebuild for partially allocated RAID arrays. Now, if a parity stripe is not mapped, no rebuild of this stride is necessary. Before, all these strides would have been written with zeros.
Replication Enhancements
Release 9.1 expands the zHyperlink functionality to include writes to Global Mirror primary volumes. This is a performance benefit for Global Mirror users that could reduce the response time for DB2 Log writes by a factor of four. If you are not currently using zHyperlink, IntelliMagic Vision provides guidance to indicate how much of your workload could potentially exploit it.
Hardware reserves were not allowed on z/OS volumes in HyperSwap environments but Release 9.1 along with some z/OS PTFs will enable this. Note that Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex (GDPS) support for this function is planned as a small program enhancement (SPE) on GDPS 4.3. This provides better compatibility between GDPS and applications that rely on hardware reserves.
Before Release 9.1, Fixed Block (FB) volumes were limited to 2 TB when used with any type of replication. Now, FB volumes up to 4 TB will work with copy services and they may either be standard volumes or Extent Space Efficient (ESE). This enables FB storage configurations in replication environments to be simpler and easier to manage.
Safeguarded Copy
IBM announced a few improvements to Safeguarded Copy (SGC) as part of this release. SGC is typically used to take many frequent copies of a production environment. This can protect your system from accidental or malicious corruption as the storage may be easily rolled back to an earlier time.
The space release function is now supported on both CKD (z/OS) and FB volumes configured in a SGC relationship. Also, it is now possible to dynamically expand the capacity available for SGC. In the past this was disruptive and required you to delete all backups. This is very handy if you want to retain backups longer or increase the frequency of SGC backups.
Another new feature is an enhanced sizing methodology for SGC using a write monitoring bitmap produced by the DS8900F (also available for the DS8880). This bitmap is also useful for sizing the repository for Extent Space Efficient (ESE) FlashCopy.
The write monitoring bitmap notes when each track has been written on a volume but has no other function beyond this. The bitmap may be started, stopped, reset, and queried. These commands are only available through the Copy Services Manager (CSM) and there is no GUI, DSCLI or TSO support.
IBM also provides an ESE Sizer tool to analyze the query outputs to do the sizing. At some point the sizing functionality may be incorporated directly into CSM. This capability should help improve sizing for SGC and ESE FlashCopy which will limit disruptions due to running out of capacity.
Transparent Cloud Tiering
IBM made several enhancements in this release that apply to using DS8900F with Transparent Cloud Tiering (TCT). With TCT, the DS8900F can migrate data to the cloud over ethernet network connections. Note that the standard ethernet connection on a DS8900F is 1 Gb but the optional 10 Gbit connection is highly recommended if TCT is being considered. The cloud may be a public or private cloud service such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or it could be an IBM TS7700 tape library. The enhancements in this release pertain to TCT using TS7700 as the cloud repository.
The new release enables the DS8900F to use TS7700 as an object store. With object store, data is saved with comprehensive metadata, eliminating the tiered file structure used in traditional hierarchical storage, and places everything into a flat address space, called a storage pool. This approach is ideal for retaining massive amounts of unstructured data. Please note that IntelliMagic Vision already provides some functionality for monitoring object stores on the IBM TS7700.
A TS7700 cluster can now support both traditional FICON workloads and TCT object workloads at the same time. The TS7700 utilizes logical partitions to allocate storage from resident cache specifically dedicated to TCT objects in an object partition. Data redundancy is supported by forking the writes to two TS7700 clusters within the same grid.
Compression and Encryption
With the new release, both data compression and in-flight data encryption are supported with TCT. Hardware accelerated compression is done by the DS8900F using the NX842 compression engine in POWER9. The compression engine is off chip and will not impact host I/O nor Copy Services performance on the DS8900F.
Compression is only available when a TS7700 is used as an object store. It will not work with other cloud repositories at this time. Data is only decompressed when recalled by the DS8900F. TCT Secure Data Transfer uses in-flight encryption to provide an extra layer of security for data transfer. Data is encrypted by the DS8900F and decrypted by the TS7700.
The DS8900F uses the POWER9 crypto engine so it does not use processor cycles and has no effect on DS8900F I/O performance. Note that this is not the same as encrypting data at rest and does not require an external key manager. This function also requires using TS7700 (with release 5.1 code level) as an object store.
The new release enables DFSMSdss Full Volume Dump Support with TCT, which is a new use case. Until now, TCT was primarily used for archiving inactive data. The new use case allows TCT to be used with active data when a dump and restore is required. DFSMSdss will enable a command-based dump to cloud and recall directly to production volumes. Since this activity occurs over ethernet, the potential performance impact of dump related FICON traffic on the DS8900F would not be felt.
Next Steps
I hope this blog helps you understand some of the features and functions included in the latest IBM DS8900F release. If you want more technical details, please see the presentation provided by the IBM Washington Systems Center here.
If you are looking for a complete solution to managing your IBM storage, you need look no farther than IntelliMagic Vision. For z/OS environments, IntelliMagic Vision can help you manage performance and capacity for IBM DS8000 (or EMC and HDS) as well as IBM TS7700 and see how they interrelate with your overall system performance. For Open Systems, IntelliMagic Vision gives you deep insight into your storage arrays and SAN.
zHyperLink: The Holy Grail of Mainframe I/O?
This white paper discusses IBM’s positioning of the zHyperLink technology, and provides some considerations for installations that consider to deploy it.
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Interactive FICON Topology Viewer Spotlights Configuration Errors
Having an accurate picture of FICON topology is essential for identifying configuration errors or sub-optimal configuration within the z/OS infrastructure. With the release of 12.5.0, IntelliMagic Vision introduced an interactive FICON Topology Viewer. Using the FICON Topology Viewer, performance analysts can now visualize, and interact with, their entire FICON infrastructure.
Until now, mainframe analysts hoping to achieve this visualization have relied upon manually printed, static visualizations of their topology – often taped to a wall – in order to evaluate their FICON configuration and spot errors. IntelliMagic Vision users are now able to save countless hours of manual examination in their analysis.
Use Cases
The FICON Topology Viewer helps analysts identify configuration errors, ensure that the infrastructure is configured correctly, and reveal undesirable infrastructure changes.
Example use cases include:
- FICON Channel Speed is Auto-Negotiated To A Lower Speed: This issue often occurs when a component in the FICON infrastructure cannot run at the faster speed. Using the FICON Topology view, analysts can look at the individual ports/connections for the CEC, FICON Switch and Disk, and determine where the problem is. This may be a microcode issue, a hardware component problem or simply a configuration issue.
- LPARs Running at a Different FICON Speed to the Same Disk/Tape Units: The FICON Topology view allows you so see if all of the LPARs and connections are running at the same and desired speed.
- Verify All LPARs Have Desired Number Of FICON Connections to the Specific Device: Typically, FICON connections to Disks and Tapes are defined for not only performance and throughput, but also availability. The FICON Topology Viewer allows analysts to verify that all LPARs have the desired number of FICON connections to the specific device.
- Verify the Infrastructure is Correctly Defined For Emergency Site Fail-Over: The FICON Topology view allows analysts to verify that the primary and secondary disk systems have the same infrastructure configuration on both sites.
- Verify the Configuration and Optimize Component Usage: Drilldowns are available in the FICON Topology Viewer to show specific charts for that specific component. For example: drilling down on a Disk can show the front-end adapter utilization in a very intuitive min/max/average chart for all of the adapters. This allows analysts to verify that all the components are being used and have a similar utilization.
- Identify System Outages or Offline FICON Channels: The time-selection and compare feature within the FICON Topology Viewer allows analysts to identify issues such as FICON channels being put offline (possibly due to error conditions) or system outages (LPAR IPLs).
The video below demonstrates the FICON Topology Viewer and how access to interactive data with the FICON topology enables analysts to easily spot changes and assess their configuration.
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Discuss your technical or sales-related questions with our mainframe experts today
Benefits of Analysis Across SMF Data Types
Escaping Data Silos Within SMF Data Types
Mainframe performance analysts rely heavily on the great insights provided by SMF measurement data into each component of the z/OS ecosystem. While there is extensive interaction and interdependence across many of the z/OS components, analysis of various SMF data types often relies on tooling that is unique to each data type.
Unfortunately, this has formed a barrier to collaborating on performance analysis across disciplines.
This article will show examples of how performance analysts can become more effective through having visibility into multiple types of SMF data.
Examples cited in this article are based on SMF data from:
- WLM and CICS
- Address Space and Db2 Accounting
- CICS and Db2
- MQ and CICS
Hopefully these scenarios will stimulate your thinking to identify many other situations where analysis performed by your teams can benefit from collaboration and using SMF data across disciplines.
No matter which subsystem you are primarily responsible for, we hope this article will help you blur the boundaries between the SMF ‘silos’ for each product.
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