Getting Started with
IBM PM of OS/390 Java TM Technology Edition

Trademarks

Java and all Java-based marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries.

The following terms, denoted by an asterisk (*) when used for the first time in this paper, are trademarks of the IBM Corporation in the United States or other countries:

UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries licensed exclusively through X/Open Company Limited.

The following terms, denoted by two asterisks (**) when used for the first time in this paper, are trademarks of other companies:

Introduction

Performance Monitoring of OS/390, or PM of OS/390 for short, is a workstation-based function that allows you to monitor the various resources in an OS/390* system and even in a sysplex in a very flexible way. PM of OS/390 provides filtered data in a graphical format within DataViews, allows you to manage multiple DataViews as one entity by providing the concept of a PerfDesk, and offers the means to make definitions such as DataViews and PerfDesks persistent for reuse at any time.

The new PM of OS/390 Java TM Technology Edition is now provided on a product level and runs in contrast to its predecessor on any Windows** platform, such as Windows 9x/NT**. The dependency on OS/2* disappeared while at the same time appearance and functionality of PM of OS/390 have been greatly improved.

This tutorial introduces the Java Edition of PM of OS/390 to you and helps you get started using PM of OS/390 in order to monitor the performance of your OS/390 system, your parallel sysplex, or many sysplexes in your enterprise. The following seven lessons guide you step by step through the terminology and usage of PM of OS/390. The examples shown in this document are based on the sysplex My Sysplex that has been created during installation of PM of OS/390. You are encouraged to carry them out on your installation!

Lesson 1 - Overall Concept

I assume that the guided installation of PM of OS/390 on the workstation has been finished successfully and that the appropriate level of the Java runtime environment exists for the operating system platform you use. When you chose the typical installation or selected the Java Runtime in the custom installation, the appropriate level of Java Runtime Environment is installed without impacting any other Java installation on your workstation.

It is also assumed that the distributed data server, that you have uploaded to the host before, is started and active on one system within each sysplex that you want to monitor.

If these prerequisites are not fulfilled, please check the appendix for a quick reference of what is necessary to do or follow the detailed instruction guidelines shipped with this function.

During the installation you were prompted to specify a program folder for PM of OS/390. The default is "RMF Workstation Products". Navigate to it by clicking on the Start-button, then on Programs, and last click on PM of OS/390 within the program folder created. When you start PM of OS/390 the first time a screen similar than the one below is shown:


Figure 1.


You are prompted to logon to the sysplex My Sysplex. Logon with a valid User ID and Password, then click on Ok to get to the screen shown on the next page. Make sure that the User ID specified exists on the host whose IP address has been specified during installation. For details how to setup a sysplex, refer to the next chapter.

The window entitled PM of OS/390 is divided into two parts. On the left side a notebook with two tabs is shown - one for the PerfDesks, that means basically the various graphical views and their folders that you have defined, and the other one for the resources PM of OS/390 has access to. The first time you start PM of OS/390, the PerfDesk section only shows one item - the Samples PerfDesk folder. Later on you will see how to create your own PerfDesk folders to organize all your views based on functional or organizational requirements.

On the right side a notebook is provided with a tab for each PerfDesk that is currently open. For example, the figure on the next page shows you the Sysplex - Overview PerfDesk which consists of four DataViews. A DataView displays a bar chart of performance metrics -so called series- and controls the retrieval of the data from the host. This allows you to have different refresh intervals in the DataViews as well as to start or stop data sampling in one DataView without impacting other DataViews.

Below the bar chart in a DataView, the legend classifies the series by color and name. If you add multiple metrics, each one is presented in a different color. The control panel below or left of each DataView allows you to start or stop data sampling for this DataView just by clicking on the colored status button on the lower left corner. A green color indicates active data sampling, while a red color indicates no data sampling. If you move the slider you can navigate back and forth on the time axis. The current sample as well as the related time stamp indicate the time you are currently looking at.


In the figure above, the DataView with the title Processor utilization of systems in Sysplex shows you the systems in that sysplex with the highest processor utilization. The DataView consists of one series that is called % processor utilization by mvs image. The sample has been collected at 04:26:40 on February 2nd and you see that system AQTS reports the highest CPU utilization. A series like this is called value-list since for one metric (here, processor utilization) a list of values is reported (here, by mvs image). As a general rule, value-list series can always be recognized by the preposition by.

Similarly, the DataView with the title I/O: Volumes with highest activity in Sysplex shows you the value-list i/o intensity by volume1 for the seven volumes with the highest I/O intensity in the sysplex. As you look at the labels underneath the bars you see the system name that is placed in front of each volume label. This tells you from which system this I/O intensity has been measured. In the example above, the highest I/O intensity volume is ML1106 on AQTS with a value of 1284 ms/s. The way the labels are created in general is the subject of lesson 3 where the resource naming concept is described.

Besides value-list series, PM of OS/390 also provides single-value series. On a chart, a single-value series is shown for several intervals at once, that means that instead of certain instances on the x-axis the sample time is shown instead. So, single-value series can be seen as trends for a certain metric. Like with value-list series, it is possible to add multiple single-value series to one DataView, however, it is not possible to mix the type of series within a DataView.

Lesson 2 - Sysplex Connectivity

PM of OS/390 is a client/server application. The client on the workstation is periodically asking for data provided by one or more servers on remote hosts. This lesson shows you how to define such remote hosts to PM of OS/390. Before that, however, I would like to show you a feature that allows you to change the look and feel of this application. When you select the View menu item on the action bar, a pop-up menu is opened. By default, the item System Look and Feel is selected which means that all the graphical controls are rendered in a way common to the system you are currently working at.


Figure 2.


If you prefer to have the controls rendered in the typical Java look, select the menu item Java Look and Feel. Since the system look and feel dialog controls such as sliders or tabs have a consistent look and feel across all applications on your workstation, they are usually easier to recognize and use. With system settings, let us now start to define a remote host.


Figure 3.


What role is a remote host playing? On the remote host the server part of PM of OS/390 has to be installed and running. This host can run in any WLM mode. If it happens to be a member in a sysplex, it also represents all the other systems in that sysplex at the same time. So, in other words, one definition is sufficient for a sysplex. Isolated systems need their own definition. In this sense they have to be understood as a special case of sysplex, consisting just of one system.

To define a remote host2 , select the menu item File on the action bar and then click on New, then on Sysplex... . The dialog shown in Figure 4 is displayed in response to that.


Figure 4.


  1. New Sysplex specifies a description of the system or the sysplex that appears as the first level entry with the resource tree shown on the Resources notebook page.
  2. Host Name specifies the TCP/IP host name of a system where the distributed data server (DDS) runs. You can enter a symbolic name that can be resolved by a name-server or your hosts file, or an IP address like 9.164.182.251. Remember that this host represents the whole sysplex if it is a member in a sysplex configuration.
  3. Port Number specifies the TCP/IP port the distributed data server is listening to. Make sure that this port number matches the port passed to the data server during startup. The default port is set to 8801.
  4. User ID specifies the TSO user id on behalf of which PM of OS/390 opens a sysplex by default. This user id is related to the system represented by the host name specified above. Of course, any other valid user id can be entered on the logon panel when opening a sysplex.
  5. You can choose whether or not a PerfDesk should be started immediately after logon to the sysplex by selecting a PerfDesk Folder in the combo box Start PerfDesks in Folder. You have seen the Sysplex Overview PerfDesk as an example which is started when My Sysplex is opened. This PerfDesk is an item in the Samples PerfDesk Folder.
  6. In order to display the correct time values on the data views, you finally have to adjust the host GMT offset for your time zone. The offset should be preset with the correct value that corresponds to your locale. For remote domains, however, you need to check whether the offset is correct and change it if not.
You finish the definition by clicking on button Ok. Note, that the Ok button can be selected only when for each of the items 1 to 4 some input has been specified. If you take a look at the Resources notebook page you will notice the new sysplex.

By the way, in the rare case where you would like to get rid of a sysplex definition, click the right mouse button on the respective item on the Resources notebook page and select menu item Delete.

Lesson 3 - Resources

In this lesson you will learn to navigate through the resources tree that is shown when you click on the Resources notebook tab. PM of OS/390 has a certain concept of what resources are and how they are organized in the sysplex.

A resource is any facility of a computing system or an operating system required by a job or task. The resources handled by PM of OS/390 are based on a data model that defines the hierarchy of these resources. The top resource is the Sysplex. It is the root of the resource hierarchy tree. Below the Sysplex in the hierarchy are the resource types Coupling Facility and Image. Children of Coupling facility are resources of type CF-Structure while the children of Image are resources like I/O-Subsystem, Processor, or Storage.

In PM of OS/390, resources are named according to the following convention: each resource is identified by its

  1. upper level qualifier
  2. resource name
  3. resource type
The resource name is written in the following style:

<upper level qualifier>,<resource name>,<resource type>

Examples of resource descriptors are:

SYS2,DATA01,Volume

This descriptor describes a volume named DATA01 that is mounted in MVS image SYS2.

SYS1,Image

This descriptor represents the resource type Image and its SMF name SYS1. The upper level qualifier isn't specified here since each MVS image is unique in a sysplex.

For some resources, only one instance exists within its containing resource. The convention for these resources is that the resource name is simply omitted. For example, there is only one SQA or only one processor3 in an MVS image so this resource would be identified by:

SYS2,SQA or by SYS2,Processor

Before you can look at the resources in your sysplex, you have to open a connection to that sysplex. My Sysplex is open already. You can recognize this by the [+] sign in front of the sysplex description. Figure 5 shows the resource configuration of the My Sysplex. To open any other sysplex, go to the Resources notebook page, click on the sysplex description with the right mouse button, and select Open.

The resources are ordered hierarchically in a configuration tree. The nodes of this tree can be expanded interactively, starting at the root node. The root node represents the top level resource Sysplex. Even if the remote host associated with a description is an isolated system, it is still modeled as a sysplex.

The links between the nodes of the resource hierarchy represent relationships. However, the semantics of these relationships are not uniform for the whole tree. In most cases, the relationship is 'contained', which means that the resource represented by the higher level node is an aggregate of the resources represented by its lower level nodes.

The [+] sign before the sysplex description or before any resource indicates that you can expand it into its contained resources. Just click on the [+] beside the sysplex description and the contained resources should be listed indented below. Vice versa, if a [-] sign is shown beside a resource you can click on it to collapse its contained resources. A resource without a [+] before its name has no contained resources and thus cannot be expanded any further.

For example, go to My Sysplex and click on [+] beside "My Sysplex - MCLXCF01,Sysplex". The configuration tree for the resource My Sysplex is expanded and you see the MVS images as well as the coupling facilities configured in that sysplex. When you click on [+] beside "AQTS,Image" in turn, the resource tree of system AQTS is expanded and all resources contained in that system are shown.


Figure 5.


Lesson 4 - Creating DataViews

Now you should be familiar with the most important concepts that belong to PM of OS/390. This is the point in time where you can start to create your own DataViews. The following case study assumes that you have a sysplex and that one goal of operations is to monitor the activity on the sysplex and its contained systems continuously.

How do we start with the definition of such a DataView? The first consideration is to identify the metrics that you need in order to tell whether a system has high or low activity. There are several possibilities how to define what 'activity' really means. In the following example, 'activity' is interpreted as