CCSS, QSystem Monitor V12, the performance monitoring and reporting solution from CCSS, now features in-depth, real-time disk monitoring capabilities that answer some of the most urgent DASD issues facing System i shops today, including ASP and temporary storage monitoring, the company says.

DASDÆs role as the system fall guy, taking the brunt of looping jobs or applications, need no longer be the expensive, catch-all solution to system ills, says the company. Rather than throw increased capacity to accommodate problems, QSystem MonitorÆs V12 turns the equation around and allows operators to identify and resolve threats to DASD in real-time so disk is not used unnecessarily.

A new level of freedom and flexibility to monitor objects that could impact DASD gives operators fresh insight into system resource use. For example, shops running high availability solutions can now monitor journal receivers (such as the audit journal) in real-time and attach a threshold that will alert them if levels are breached. Similarly, important physical files in third party applications, such as payroll, can now be monitored. Data queues, distribution queues, object sizes as well as file record counts, deletions and percentages now give new scope to real-time problem identification.

Monitoring ASPs and Temporary Storage

Object monitoring helps operators to guard against problems that could arise around specific objects and impact system resources if left unchecked. V12Æs ASP and temporary storage monitoring takes care of unforeseen DASD issues that could degrade performance and impact users without the time consuming requirement of interrogating individual jobs on the system, the company says. Without close monitoring of ASPÆs, overflow into a central ASP, caused by an undetected problem on the system, could leave data unprotected and at risk of being lost altogether should the system crash. Independent ASPÆs, which are unable to overflow into another ASP, can also be monitored to detect when they are reaching maximum desired capacity. At-a-glance monitoring of ASPÆs and physical disk units can be defined in several ways with real-time monitoring of the percentage of ASP Busy Unit; number of ASP Busy Unit; ASP Space Free; ASP Space Used and ASP Status, to name a fewùthis makes the pinpointing and resolution of problems a speedy process.

Typically, even innocent system changes can cause the auxiliary storage to surge without immediate understanding as to what has caused the surge. Seemingly small security changes that so often follow an audit, such as revoking access to a particular file, can cause a job to loop, generate spool files, and ultimately send the auxiliary storage soaring. These situations, whilst not unavoidable altogether, are able to be identified in real-time before they have an opportunity to impact on resource and users.

Temporary storage issues can be overcome by creating a dedicated group monitor. This can be as simple as a single bar in the online monitor that will alert operators of threshold breaches requiring investigation. In this case, clicking on the bar will show the individual subsystems and the total MB usage of each. Operators can then immediately create a new group monitor to detect all the jobs running in that sub system and view the temporary storage usage of each. By "floating" the view, any number of jobs that reside in that subsystem can be easily viewed and sorted into high usage order for immediate problem identification.

This entire process pinpoints problems in a couple of minutes, ensuring operators can be pro-active to their temporary storage issues. Prior to this new flexibility in QSystem MonitorÆs V12, operators had no simple means of reporting through OS/400 to show temporary storage usage and were forced to investigate a painstaking one-by-one analysis of what could be hundreds of jobs in any particular sub system, the company says. The flexibility of V12 gives operators the option to monitor temporary storage by job, user, subsystem or even the entire system.

QSystem MonitorÆs disk monitoring capabilities form part of the overall performance solution that also covers system monitoring, network monitoring, job monitoring and availability monitoring to complete V12Æs core performance monitoring and reporting components.

About CCSS

CCSS develops, supports and markets IBM System i performance monitoring and reporting, message management and remote management solutions. An Advanced IBM Business Partner, CCSS develops powerful solutions to support some of the worldÆs most demanding System i environments across many industries including insurance, banking, pharmaceutical and manufacturing. All CCSS solutions are IBM ServerProven and qualify for IBMÆs ServerProven rebate program.

Existing customers who rely on CCSSÆs feature-rich solutions include leading organisations such as Volvo, Mattel, Newell-Rubbermaid, The Royal Bank of Scotland, Siemens Medical, RWE npower and WaterstoneÆs.

CCSS is headquartered in Gillingham, Kent, UK with key regional headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA; Bonn, Germany and Makati City, Philippines together with a global agent network spanning Portugal, Brazil, the Netherlands and Sweden.