Message Advisor for IMS
- Data Sheet
Message Advisor for IMS
Key benefits
- Improves IMS availability and prevents IMS outages
- Improves IMS availability by significantly reducing IMS message queue restart times
- Performs intelligent message recovery at the individual message level, by group or system-wide
- Provides an application view of messaging with message profiling and grouping
- Performs fast message queue management, including displays, unloads, deletes, and requeues
Business challenge
Today's diverse enterprises present challenges to organizations. Legacy data is often at the core of the enterprise. IMS and DB2® continue to be robust, reliable servers of choice in this environment. Additional pressure to compete in global markets and make data easily accessible to customers and business partners has driven the need to open IMS and DB2 through IMS TM to MQ Series and the Web.
This new environment brings more variable and unpredictable workloads that organizations must manage. If effective work flow monitoring and management safeguards are not in place, applications can jeopardize the stability of IMS TM. The IMS message queues are at the center of this work flow, because every transaction request involves writing a message to one of these queues. Program looping, link and device failures or "spamming" can cause message flooding and costly, unplanned IMS outages.
The health and integrity of the IMS message queues is as critical as the health and integrity of the IMS databases. In fact, the health of the IMS message queues affects all IMS users and their ability to access information.
BMC Software solution
Message Advisor for IMS builds on the Q:MANAGER IMS™ suite of products. It automatically monitors and manages local IMS message queues to prevent IMS outages and improve IMS availability. Message Advisor for IMS includes a unique feature to significantly improve IMS restart times, and it provides a comprehensive set of message management tools that operate in both shared and local queues environments. The tools solve message-related IMS system and/or application problems.
|
Industry
|
Business operation
|
Industry cost range per hour ($)
|
Average cost per hour ($)
|
Financial
|
Brokerage operations
|
5.6 - 7.3 million
|
6.5 million
|
Financial
|
Credit card/sales authorization
|
2.2 - 3.1 million
|
2.6 million
|
Media
|
Pay-per-view television
|
67,000 - 233,000
|
150,000
|
Retail
|
Home shopping (TV)
|
87,000 - 140,000
|
113,000
|
Retail
|
Home catalog sales
|
60,000 - 120,000
|
90,000
|
Transport
|
Airline reservations
|
67,000 - 112,000
|
99,500
|
Media
|
Teleticket sales
|
56,000 - 82,000
|
69,000
|
Transport
|
Package shipping
|
24,000 - 32,000
|
28,000
|
Finance
|
Automatic teller machine fees
|
12,000 - 17,000
|
14,500
|
Improve IMS availability
The cost of downtime is sometimes difficult to quantify, but the above table from Gartner summarizes the cost of an outage.
Message Advisor for IMS prevents IMS outages caused by invalid messages and by message flooding. To prevent an outage caused by message flooding, Message Advisor for IMS
- Continuously tracks the state of the IMS message queues
- Compares the queue usage to user-defined thresholds
- Sends optional warning messages
- Can take preventative actions
To prevent an IMS outage caused by an invalid message, Message Advisor for IMS
- Automatically identifies invalid messages
- Notifies the processing application program
- Issues a message to indicated that an outage has been avoided
The unique Hiperassist feature shortens IMS message queue restart time by up to 60%.
Manage and recover messages
Message Advisor for IMS is the fastest, most comprehensive solution available to manage IMS message queues. The queue management utilities perform fast, intelligent message queue analysis, quickly showing the queue contents and message queue polluters. Message Advisor for IMS allows you to easily and effectively perform the following local and shared queues management functions:
- Instantaneously display the health of the message queues and list the biggest queue users
- Analyze the message queue contents
- Remove unwanted messages from the IMS message queue
- Merge IMS systems by recovering all messages from multiple IMS systems to a single IMS, while also appropriately handling remote SYSIDs
- Group messages by origin or destination, such as transaction, program, database, MQ Series, or the Web, giving an application view to message management
- Recover from application errors by unloading erroneous messages from either the IMS message queue or the IMS logs, optionally changing them and reinserting them into the IMS message queue
- Recover IMS messages system-wide, in groups, or individually, providing full granularity and flexibility in failure situations
- Recover your IMS system and preserve application integrity by returning unprocessed messages to the message queues after an IMS cold start
- Perform modeling and stress-testing by capturing production messages for loading into a test IMS system
About BMC Software
BMC Software, Inc. [NYSE: BMC], is the leading provider of enterprise management solutions that assure business availability – maintaining and optimizing business-critical systems with
automated infrastructure management and unique service management capabilities. BMC Software is a member of the S&P 500, with fiscal year 2001 revenues exceeding $1.5 billion and
offices worldwide. For more information, please visit BMC Software’s Web site at www.bmc.com. For more information on BMC Software, visit us on the Web at www.bmc.com.