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The BMC MAINVIEW Advantage Overview
The role of business service management
Performance management issues
MAINVIEW solutions
MAINVIEW Features and Functions
Automation and object management
Benefits of MAINVIEW solutions
MAINVIEW product family
Storage resource management products
For more information
Helping you maintain advantage
Overview
While data processing environments evolve and change, particularly with the expanded use of web-based transactions and applications, the mainframe continues to “own” and process most of the world’s data. z/OS environments, with their myriad subsystems and resources, are essential to business-critical applications. Managing the performance of the mainframe environment is vital to the success of the enterprise, but that management can be complex and daunting. Users need integrated, easy-to-use solutions, such as the MAINVIEW® products from BMC Software to monitor, manage, automate, optimize, and simplify complex z/OS environments.
The role of business service management
Business Service Management (BSM) aligns IT resources and processes with key business processes and manages them based on business priorities. BSM enables best practices for mainframe management so the organization can
- link operations more strategically to its business process
- establish automated management processes
- continually reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the mainframe environment
MAINVIEW enables organizations to manage mainframes as part of a cohesive enterprise management strategy. Fewer support calls from end users, a reduction in the duration of IT outages, and reduced cost of compliance are just a few of the advantages that are offered by using MAINVIEW solutions to implement a BSM strategy.
Performance management issues
Managing the performance of z/OS environments requires more than managing just the operating systems and traditional subsystems. To be effective, performance management must encompass the operating system, databases, storage resources, middleware, and networks. Just a few years ago, data center personnel could concentrate on managing and optimizing z/OS, CICS, DB2®, IMS, and VTAM. Now, new operating systems, subsystems and middleware, including UNIX System Services, TCP/IP, WebSphere MQ, WebSphere Application Server, and Linux must also be considered.
The complexity of today’s mainframe environment presents challenges for both management and technical personnel.
For an IT manager, the pressure is constantly on to do more with less—to provide better service with fewer resources. The people and products that manage the systems and the cost of those resources are major concerns to IT managers.
Doing more with less
For managers, it always comes down to the bottom line—total cost of ownership (TCO). In today’s business environment, IT managers are expected to minimize costs and postpone expenditures whenever possible. That challenge means exploiting the hardware that they have and finding ways to solve performance problems that don’t involve buying more hardware.
Staffing an IT department with qualified personnel is an ongoing challenge because skilled mainframe technicians are becoming increasingly scarce. The technicians who are available typically have little experience with z/OS environments. To support those systems with fewer, less-skilled technicians, managers need to reduce the amount of time and expertise required for performance management.
The IT staff who manage z/OS performance have their own concerns, such as service levels and time. How long has there been a problem and how does it affect the service that we promise our customers? How much time will it take to determine the cause of the problem and resolve it? How can we prevent the problem from recurring and improve the business service that we provide? Is this problem a recurring problem, and can we automate the corrective actions?
In addition to the traditional problems of performance management—job delays, paging problems, storage constraints, shared DASD, and application performance—there might be technology challenges:
- parallel sysplex environments with n-way data sharing
- Coupling Facility monitoring
- Workload Manager Goal mode
- dynamic vs. static workload balancing
- transition to Workload License Charge (WLC)
- introduction of Linux to the mainframe
- web enablement of legacy applications by using WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere MQ, UNIX System Services, and TCP/IP
In this increasingly complex environment, technicians are always expected to deliver service and availability, with reduced resource consumption and improved performance. The IT staff in a z/OS environment needs comprehensive performance management tools. They need tools that are simple and reliable, and they need links between those tools, to make managing the various systems and subsystems easier.
Even the performance management products themselves can present a challenge. How many different software vendors does your performance management plan rely upon? How well do all of those single-use products work together? Will the vendor still be in the performance management business next year? IT managers need to have confidence in their performance management solutions both now and in the future.
MAINVIEW solutions
To address the complex performance management issues of today’s mainframe environment, for both management and technical staff, BMC Software offers the MAINVIEW family of products.
Single point of control
MAINVIEW is an integrated family of advanced performance management solutions for z/OS, in both traditional and parallel sysplex environments. MAINVIEW enables you to proactively monitor and automatically manage availability and application service levels across your z/OS, CICS, IMS, DB2, WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere MQ, USS, IP, VTAM, and Linux environments from one single point of control. With MAINVIEW you can
- detect problems that affect normal operation
- determine the cause of problems
- resolve the problem
- automate processes to prevent situations from becoming problems and to prevent problems from re-occurring
- improve TCO for managing the mainframe infrastructure and service delivery
BMC Software provides the most functional, robust, and scalable systems management solutions in the marketplace. MAINVIEW is the standard for z/OS performance management for many reasons:
- MAINVIEW provides totally integrated access to z/OS, CICS, DB2, IMS, WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere MQ, Unix System S, IP, VTAM, Linux, and storage resources. Using one or more MAINVIEW products, the integrated architecture allows a single user to monitor and manage multiple local and remote systems, whether it is z/OS itself, or subsystems such as CICS, IMS, and DB2.
- MAINVIEW navigation and ease of use is unparalleled. A user can transfer from anywhere to anywhere within the MAINVIEW suite, without having a separate product interface and technology layer. Hyperlinks facilitate problem diagnosis, regardless of location or product. Users never have to back out of what they are doing to go to another MAINVIEW component.
- MAINVIEW provides the freedom of choice for user interfaces. MAINVIEW Explorer, which is built in to the MAINVIEW product suite, offers users web access to the MAINVIEW products with no additional products or license charges. All MAINVIEW features are also available through the 3270 interface. Because there are no hubs, workstations, or servers in the architecture, there are no single points of failure.
- MAINVIEW includes built-in parallel sysplex support at no additional charge. No additional products, hubs, workstations, or servers are necessary. The Coupling Facility, XCF, Data Sharing, and Goal Mode are all fully supported.
- MAINVIEW provides direct integration to the BMC Service Impact Manager product. Enterprise Event and Business Impact Management is now possible using MAINVIEW to integrate into other Business Service Management solutions from BMC.
- MAINVIEW solutions provide the most breadth in the industry. They can go beyond monitoring to provide dynamic optimization, application tuning, performance reporting, space management, and predictive planning, all designed to help lower the cost of mainframe computing.
- BMC Software continues to enhance these products. Through the addition of new features (such as support for the IBM WLC), the addition of new products (such as MAINVIEW Transaction Analyzer), and the continued improvement of the MAINVIEW infrastructure, BMC Software helps ensure continued value for customers’ investment in MAINVIEW.
- BMC Software is committed to supporting the mainframe marketplace. BMC Software, the world’s fifth largest software vendor with annual revenues of over $1.2 billion, was the first independent software vendor to provide tools for IBM mainframe systems. Holding more than 40 software patents today with over 8,000 customers worldwide, BMC Software is no stranger to mainframe needs and resolutions, and remains committed to the mainframe marketplace, which is so critical to our customers.
MAINVIEW provides the means to centralize, standardize, and manage your enterprise’s entire z/OS systems through a single point of control. MAINVIEW product integration enables host system monitoring and automation (even in remote locations) through a common terminal session.
Better performance with less expertise
The MAINVIEW performance management solutions are easy to use and require less z/OS expertise than other tools. A common interface makes it easy to switch between products. All product views are available through both ISPF and a web browser interface. In addition to traditional command line access, MAINVIEW offers point-and-shoot navigation with extensive hyperlinks (fast links to other MAINVIEW products) and quick access menus.
The MAINVIEW products from BMC Software deliver these advantages:
- Performance management leadership. MAINVIEW was the first to market with solutions for WebSphere Application and Linux. MAINVIEW Transaction Analyzer is the only product on the market that tracks and correlates transactions as they move through the sysplex.
- Significant investment in new products. MAINVIEW Transaction Analyzer and integration of MAINVIEW and Business Service Manager are some recent examples of the BMC Software commitment to deliver new solutions.
- Significant investment in existing products. BMC Software continues to enhance the MAINVIEW architecture and add new features to MAINVIEW products.
- Best customer support in the industry. Customer support representatives and developers are on the same team, providing support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year as part of the standard maintenance agreement.
MAINVIEW Features and Functions
MAINVIEW products provide best-of-breed performance management solutions through a range of features and functions. This section describes several key capabilities.
Single system image (SSI)
With MAINVIEW, you can collect data from many systems in many locations and display that data in a single view as if it were from a single system. The built-in single system image support gives you the power to monitor and manage multiple z/OS systems as though they were one. And MAINVIEW’s single point of control capability allows you to control all of those systems from a single screen.
Single system image is required for workload management, Coupling Facility monitoring, and all system objects and resources, including
- shared DASD management
- AOR routing in CICS
- message processing in IMS
- data sharing in DB2
- multisystem QMGRs in WebSphere MQ
- root cause analysis in enterprise-wide applications
Because MAINVIEW provides industry-unique job level WLM data in SSI mode, you don’t need to switch between images to see which jobs are causing a service class to deteriorate. In SSI mode, you can view all of the following items running on all systems:
- every CICS transaction, region, program, file, terminal, resource
- every DB2 thread, page set, buffer pool, lock, resource
- every IMS transaction, region, program, database, class, resource
- WebSphere MQ Queue Manager, queue, channel, resource
- all IP stacks, connections, response time, throughput
- VTAM LU response time, throughput, VIPA, CSM, resources
- storage controller, device, drawer, SMS group, resource
- WebSphere HTTP server, user response time, cookie, heap, servlet, WAS performance
- all USS processes, threads, users, groups, file systems, directories, resources
Single system image is provided for both sysplex and nonsysplex environments. You can define the set of systems to be displayed in single system image. And all levels of data, including detail data, are available in single system image mode, which means it is possible to display every data set that every job on every system is using on a particular DASD device. Because SSI is built into the architecture, it provides huge benefits in decreased complexity, reduced user knowledge, and faster root cause analysis time.
Automation and object management
MAINVIEW Total Object Manager provides automation and coordinated management of system objects. While MAINVIEW AutoOPERATOR provides the automation of events, Total Object Manager provides an additional level of automation, managing the Started Tasks within the z/OS environment to ensure system availability. MAINVIEW Total Object manager tracks each defined object and maintains the requested status of that object. The integration of the MAINVIEW products keeps the development of sophisticated automation and coordinated object management simple and enables the additional level of automated system availability.
MAINVIEW Total Object Manager provides
- true object dependencies
- object management scalability (layering)
- calendar scheduling (using include/exclude logic)
- sysplex transparency
Views of data
MAINVIEW products collect system performance information as data elements in a record. Each record contains real-time, interval, and session data. The data is also written to online history files. The data elements are arranged into views. You have many ways to manage the display and appearance of data in a view. You can customize views to
- control the display of fields, including their format and position
- create or change graphs of view data
- create, change, or delete hyperlinks between views and other products
- set keyword and positional parameters for a view, which can be used in filtering
- set or remove data threshold conditions for a field, change the color in which data appears when it meets a specific condition, or substitute text for data that meets a specific condition
- create a summary view, change which fields are summarized, or change how fields are summarized
Ease of navigation
With MAINVIEW, you can navigate easily by using hyperlinks, menus, and commands. You can transfer from anywhere to anywhere within the MAINVIEW suite of products and never have to back out of what you are doing to go anywhere else. There is no need to log on and off constantly nor to consume resources by using session managers. Hyperlinks or commands are always available to help you get you started on your next task.
Hyperlink fields provide a link to additional data that can offer greater detail about a potential problem. MAINVIEW provides many hyperlinks that can help you diagnose problems, regardless of location or product. You can easily define your own hyperlinks between views of data in one or more MAINVIEW products. Hyperlinks can cross product, subsystem, system, and sysplex boundaries seamlessly.
MAINVIEW includes an extensive network of menus, from high-level menus of products and components to object-specific menus that are related to a resource, job, or workload. Menus provide a quick, convenient way to access views. You can even create your own menu views to meet your site's specific needs.
For those expert users who prefer to type a command to get where they want to go, MAINVIEW offers a complete command line interface for displaying data, performing actions, and transferring between views within any MAINVIEW product on any system in any location.
Historical data
Many MAINVIEW products enable you to display data from the past, so you can
- re-create the operating environment as it existed yesterday, last week, or last month, and compare the historical data in one view with current system performance data in another view
- display multiple intervals of data that span hours, days, even weeks, and perform trending analysis on the historical performance of your system
- summarize multiple intervals of data and review past performance for a single resource or a group of resources over any time frame
- collect and report system performance information to help with capacity planning
When you request information from MAINVIEW products online, extensive, detailed information from that point in time is preserved for as long as you need. You can examine the situation from other perspectives within a consistent time frame. You can retain the information indefinitely, and you can export it to an external file. MAINVIEW Explorer enables you to create graphs and charts to show the historical data.
Batch reports
With the data collected by MAINVIEW products, you can produce historical performance reports by submitting batch jobs. An ISPF dialog panel helps you generate the JCL and submit the job.
You might want to submit a job each day to report some of the key elements of performance for the previous day. MAINVIEW enables you to submit the same job on a periodic basis, without having to change the JCL. The report output, which is nearly the same format as the online displays, can be directed to a data set or SYSOUT.
Exception monitoring
MAINVIEW Alarm Manager provides sophisticated exception monitoring capabilities. MAINVIEW Alarm Manager enables MAINVIEW products to define and generate messages that can be displayed in MAINVIEW Alarm Manager. Any data element from any MAINVIEW product can be used to generate alerts that
- create MVS console or subsystem messages
- display messages that include hyperlinks back to the MAINVIEW product that produced the alert
- trigger an automated alert or action from MAINVIEW AutoOPERATOR for quick problem resolution
You can use MAINVIEW Alarm Manager to display and manage all MAINVIEW alerts, regardless of their source. MAINVIEW Alarm Manager can monitor multiple systems simultaneously. You can display a single view that shows alerts for all MAINVIEW performance monitors within your enterprise. The “persistence” feature allows you to disregard momentary performance spikes and instead create alerts for user-defined, persistent performance problems.
The ALERTS view presents detailed alert information sorted by the time at which the alert was generated. You can display alert details sorted by time, queue name, or priority. You can also display summaries by target or queue.
BSM integration
The fundamental tenet of Business Service Management is the alignment of IT and business. The integration of MANVIEW with BMC Service Impact Manager (SIM) provides a unified view of mission critical applications to be shared by operations, the help desk, the business owner and management.
SIM bridges the operational gap that often exists on applications that span multiple applications. If a problem is detected, even within older legacy sub-systems, SIM is able to clearly show the effect on the business. Figure 1 depicts a typical mainframe alert: a CICS transaction consuming excessive CPU.
Figure 1 Typical alert
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Using the interface available in MAINVIEW, this alert is sent automatically to SIM, as depicted in Figure 2. This feature allows operations and support personnel to view the service and/or business impact.
Figure 2 Service Impact view with a CICS event
Construction of the service model can be a daunting task without powerful and flexible discovery tools. These tools can find key configuration items and assist in the population and development of service models, greatly accelerating the implementation of BSM and reducing implementation costs. BMC Discovery Expert Extension for z/OS will augment the BMC comprehensive discovery suite with mainframe collection capabilities, extending the reach and value of the Topology Discovery solution to the heart of the enterprises’ IT environment. Figure 3. shows a typical dependency map generated as part of a mainframe discovery process.
Figure 3 Mainframe discovery dependency map
Transaction management
As environments become more complex, transactions naturally become more complex. At one time, all data lived on a mainframe. Over the past several years, users have demanded continuous access to that data. This demand has created a need for nonmainframe front-ends that enable users to query and manipulate online data. For example, a banking transaction twenty years ago could have originated with a teller entering data into a dumb terminal. The transaction could have started in CICS and updated an IMS database. All of the work took place on the mainframe, and if something went wrong, technicians knew that they could find the problem in either CICS or IMS.
Today, applications and systems are much more complex. The bank in our example could still be maintaining account data in the same IMS database, but the access method has probably changed. A typical banking transaction today is an ATM withdrawal. A user requests money, and the transaction could travel from WebSphere MQ to CICS to update the IMS database, and then the transaction is returned to MQ to print a receipt. If anything goes wrong along the line, how will the people supporting the application find the error? Where should they start looking? And how quickly will they be able to resolve the problem? Will they be able to meet SLAs?
MAINVIEW Transaction Analyzer helps resolve these issues by tracking a transaction throughout its life cycle.
MAINVIEW Transaction Analyzer version 1 can track transactions as they move through CICS, DB2, and IMS. Subsequent versions will add support for WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere MQ, and other platforms.
Management by application
Companies invest in IT to drive solutions for business needs. However, traditional monitoring products focus on measuring individual components rather than the applications they are there to serve. By exploiting the MAINVIEW product integration and architecture, MAINVIEW VistaPoint brings all application components together into a composite picture of the application's behavior against expected service levels. With MAINVIEW, you can see how the system is serving your business. You can instantly see how fluctuations in system performance affect your business.
MAINVIEW Explorer
MAINVIEW Explorer offers web browser access to the MAINVIEW products, and it is included with each MAINVIEW product at no additional charge. With a click of a button, you can see how your z/OS systems and associated subsystems are performing and any exception conditions that might be occurring.
With MAINVIEW Explorer, you can view system information with easy-to-read charts and graphs. You can easily print and export MAINVIEW Explorer view data as well as “publish” views as HTML pages (see Figure 4. ).
Figure 4 MAINVIEW Explorer gauges
MAINVIEW Explorer shows the same information that you see on ISPF screens. MAINVIEW Explorer has the same look and feel as the BMC Software SmartDBA console. The MAINVIEW Explorer console consists of three frames. The navigation frame and the messages frame are dockable, which means that you can attach them to the console (their default position) or separate them from the console. These frames can be sized, moved, or closed independently of the view frame. Whatever state the console is in when it is closed, including the overall size of the console, is retained the next time the console is started.
You can publish the data from tabular views and charts to other users by placing JPEG files of the view and its chart (if one is open) in a local directory along with an HTML file. When a user double-clicks the HTML file, the view and its chart are displayed in a web browser. This option enables users to see current view data without being logged on to MAINVIEW Explorer.
You can work with selected rows in a tabular view. After selecting rows of data, you can export them to a file, copy them to a clipboard, print them, perform a host action against them, and produce a chart of their data. You can use the Find function to search for alphanumeric character strings in the columns of a tabular view. (See Figure 5. .)
Figure 5 MAINVIEW Explorer bar graph
Benefits of MAINVIEW solutions
The MAINVIEW performance management solutions
- assure availability by providing flexible and scalable management and automation
- reduce downtime by identifying bottlenecks and avoiding outages
- minimize the total cost of ownership by providing optimal responsiveness and cost control
- simplify complex environments by providing a single business view and point of control for the entire system
The following table summarizes the features and benefits of MAINVIEW products.
MAINVIEW is a high quality, fully integrated solution for performance management and automation. MAINVIEW products are easy to install, maintain, customize, and use. MAINVIEW, in conjunction with other products from BMC Software, has the scope to provide broad system and performance management solutions.
MAINVIEW product family
MAINVIEW offers a comprehensive line of monitoring, automation, and storage products as well as products that go beyond monitoring to dynamically reduce resource requirements to optimize existing resources and to provide capacity planning and performance modeling capabilities. This section briefly describes each of the MAINVIEW products. For more detailed information, please refer to the MAINVIEW Products General Information manual.
Monitoring products
MAINVIEW can monitor operating systems, subsystems, databases, networks, and middleware. BMC Software provides MAINVIEW products that monitor and manage:
- operating systems
- MAINVIEW for OS/390
- CMF MONITOR
- MAINVIEW for UNIX System Services
- MAINVIEW for Linux-Servers
- subsystems and databases
- MAINVIEW for CICS
- MAINVIEW for IMS
- MAINVIEW for DBCTL
- MAINVIEW for DB2
- networks
- MAINVIEW for IP
- MAINVIEW for VTAM
- web and middleware
- MAINVIEW for WebSphere Application Server
- MAINVIEW for WebSphere MQ
MAINVIEW for OS/390
MAINVIEW for OS/390 helps you achieve performance objectives and increase productivity across the OS/390 or z/OS enterprise. An extensive array of real-time monitoring online views provides z/OS systems performance management across an unlimited number of z/OS systems or parallel sysplex cluster environments.
MAINVIEW for OS/390 provides key metrics plus the ability to issue an alert when a threshold is being exceeded. Key metrics on workload performance, job performance, system resource utilization and enclaves as well as many other critical z/OS areas are provided.
CMF MONITOR
CMF MONITOR is a tool that collects and reports system performance information. It writes SMF performance records. CMF MONITOR gathers a broad range of data on a variety of system activities by using several components to collect the information that you need. CMF MONITOR is not only a functional replacement for the IBM RMF product, it also provides additional functionality over and above that of RMF.
MAINVIEW for UNIX System Services
MAINVIEW for USS manages and monitors UNIX applications running under z/OS. MAINVIEW for USS enables you to observe applications and resources consumed from the UNIX System Services perspective that traditional performance monitors are unable to see. MAINVIEW for USS provides detailed information about, and actions for managing, HFS and zFS file systems, USS processes and threads, BPXPRM parameters, and users. Rapid response to changing conditions is enabled by the ability to alter key USS parameters dynamically.
MAINVIEW for Linux-Servers
MAINVIEW for Linux-Servers provides services and functions to help you monitor and control your Linux servers (on z/OS and Intel) and z/VM systems. MAINVIEW for Linux-Servers uses a traditional MAINVIEW interface to provide access to Linux and z/VM data. MAINVIEW for Linux-Servers provides real-time and historical data about Linux and z/VM system and application availability, performance, usage, and configuration.
MAINVIEW for CICS
MAINVIEW for CICS monitors, manages, and enhances both traditional CICS and parallel sysplex environments to provide improved availability, recoverability, and service throughout the enterprise. MAINVIEW for CICS provides advanced monitoring and automation of all your CICS systems with automatic detection of problems, powerful application trace capabilities, and full-featured performance management tools that enable you to simultaneously purge or copy transactions across multiple regions with a single command.
MAINVIEW for IMS
MAINVIEW for IMS Online offers an optimum solution for managing and monitoring IMS workloads. It helps ensure the availability, performance, and throughput of mission- critical IMS business applications.
MAINVIEW for IMS Offline offers extensive transaction level reporting and analysis capabilities, providing a use-based cost allocation method that organizations can use to recover costs. MAINVIEW for IMS Offline combines IMS log records with information created by the unique Event Collector to generate comprehensive response time and resource utilization analysis reports.
MAINVIEW for DBCTL
MAINVIEW for DBCTL provides real-time monitoring for DBCTL environments and simplifies the management of DBCTL. The product is tightly integrated with MAINVIEW for CICS to provide a complete picture of the IT environment. MAINVIEW for DBCTL provides a single interface that can be used to manage traditional implementations as well as data-sharing environments.
MAINVIEW for DB2
MAINVIEW for DB2 provides the most comprehensive, user-friendly set of monitoring tools available for DB2. It manages all DB2 implementations, from the simplest to the most complex configurations. MAINVIEW for DB2 samples DB2 activities to identify degradation, issue early warnings, and enable automation to manage exceptions before they become problems. It manages any number of DB2 systems across multiple locations to enable you to keep track of the complete DB2 environment or focus on a specific group, which is essential for data sharing.
MAINVIEW for IP
MAINVIEW for IP provides the data required to monitor and manage the availability, throughput, and tuning of mission-critical TCP/IP applications. The displays are clear, concise, and intuitive, allowing you to diagnose a wide range of problems in a fraction of the time that is normally required. You can review historical data to ensure that valuable lessons learned from past performance issues are not forgotten. You can monitor SLA policies and detect response time problems before they spiral out of control. Customizable alerts allow you to monitor critical TCP/IP indicators around the clock and provide proactive notification of problems long before they become an issue for your users. Exclusive functionality enables you to pace (throttle) TCP/IP traffic to ensure that critical jobs are completed on time.
MAINVIEW for VTAM
MAINVIEW for VTAM provides information about availability, tuning, throughput, and end-to-end response times as they relate to the Systems Network Architecture (SNA) communications protocol. MAINVIEW for VTAM works with the BMC Software ULTRAOPT™ products to increase network throughput, to speed response times, and to improve user productivity. These products can eliminate or delay the need for additional communications hardware and can also eliminate the need to install and maintain optimization products in each application.
MAINVIEW for WebSphere Application Server
MAINVIEW for WebSphere Application Server provides full-featured monitoring in IBM WebSphere Application Server for z/OS environments. It provides valuable information about the availability and performance of the application server components, such as the controller and servant regions, the deployment manager, and the node agents within a WebSphere Application Server cell. It also gives in depth views into Java application performance, Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) throughput and CPU utilization of the EJBs. It provides details about critical activities such as garbage collection and Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) calls. It monitors key resource areas such as thread and connection pools as well as the IBM HTTP server and its log files.
By using advanced monitoring techniques such as JMX, Java profiling, byte-code instrumentation, and the IBM WebSphere performance management interface (PMI), MAINVIEW for WebSphere Application Server allows you to determine Java application component performance as well as drill down into the detail of the most exacting problem areas. In addition, views into IBM’s workload management (WLM) allow you to use enclave tokens to track a user request or transaction.
MAINVIEW for WebSphere Application Server also integrates with the BMC Performance Manager for WebSphere Application Server. You can use a BMC Performance Manager Console to view PMI-based information about WebSphere Application Server instances running on z/OS. Through this functionality, you can verify the presence and availability of IBM HTTP servers on z/OS, see whether a WebSphere Application Server is running, and view important servlet statistics.
MAINVIEW for WebSphere MQ
MAINVIEW for WebSphere MQ is a powerful and easy-to-use solution for managing the IBM WebSphere MQ environment. MAINVIEW for WebSphere MQ provides a wealth of built-in views and capabilities to minimize MQ complexity, ensure availability of MQ-enabled applications, and maintain WebSphere MQ resource integrity. MAINVIEW for WebSphere MQ integrates with BMC Performance Manager for WebSphere MQ to deliver enterprise WebSphere MQ management from the MAINVIEW console, and works with MAINVIEW AutoOPERATOR to provide automated responses to specific problems as well as control and protection. MAINVIEW for WebSphere MQ Integrator, a companion product, integrates with MAINVIEW for WebSphere MQ to manage the IBM WebSphere Message Broker on z/OS. MAINVIEW for WebSphere MQ Integrator also integrates with BMC Performance Monitor for WebSphere Business Integrator Broker to manage the enterprise broker environment from the MAINVIEW console.
Transaction management
MAINVIEW Transaction Analyzer correlates the resources that are used by components (complex transactions) across multiple systems. MAINVIEW Transaction Analyzer uses existing data from other MAINVIEW monitoring products to provide a consolidated view of the activities of components to give you a single source of information to analyze a wide spectrum of problems. Because MAINVIEW Transaction Analyzer uses data that other MAINVIEW products are collecting, the product itself causes very little additional overhead.
MAINVIEW Transaction Analyzer aggregates multiple components into a single business application or business service and provides correlated, aggregated information in a format that the user can easily understand. MAINVIEW Transaction Analyzer provides the consolidated data in near real-time.
Without MAINVIEW Transaction Analyzer, you may be forced to look through multiple products to find what caused a problem. With MAINVIEW Transaction Analyzer, you can see what happened at a glance, and you can drill down into the underlying monitor to find the root cause of the problem.
Automation products
MAINVIEW AutoOPERATOR provides the tools, techniques, and applications to improve an operator's productivity and the ability to deliver high system availability. Using MAINVIEW AutoOPERATOR options, many of the data center tasks can be automated through the use of rules, EXECs, timer facilities, MAINVIEW commands, and a sophisticated Object Management facility. Using MAINVIEW AutoOPERATOR options, many data center tasks can be automated through the use of rules, EXECs, timer facilities, and MAINVIEW commands.
MAINVIEW AutoOPERATOR also provides solutions to problems that are common across data centers. By using these solutions, you can accomplish many of the initial automation tasks quickly and efficiently with our out-of-the-box automation.
MAINVIEW AutoOPERATOR products provide simple nonprocedural rules to quickly and easily automate event handling. These products also provide the ability to run advanced automation routines in REXX. Easy to use sample EXECs send alerts to e-mail, pagers and SNMP managers. Integration with PATROL® Enterprise Manager (PEM) and PATROL® for SAP Solutions extends the reach of this comprehensive automation family.
BMC Software provides the following automation products:
- MAINVIEW AutoOPERATOR for z/OS
- MAINVIEW AutoOPERATOR for CICS
- MAINVIEW AutoOPERATOR for IMS
- MAINVIEW AutoOPERATOR for WebSphere MQ
- MAINVIEW AutoOPERATOR TapeSHARE
- MAINVIEW SRM Enterprise Storage Automation
The MAINVIEW Total Object Manager further extends the automation of system events to include the coordinated management of system objects. Integrating the automation and object management capabilities into one complete automation solution provides an additional level of automated system availability.
Storage resource management products
MAINVIEW Storage Resource Manager (SRM) is a suite of products that help you manage storage resources for the enterprise. MAINVIEW SRM enables storage administrators to reduce storage costs by managing performance and space consumption for various storage resources and processes. These resources include RAID devices, DFSMS (SMS), and DFSMShsm (HSM).
MAINVIEW SRM solutions monitor processes and devices in real time to ensure that critical business functions are online and ready when you need them. MAINVIEW SRM products prevent abends, automate processes to ensure availability, and report events and errors that have occurred. They ensure that performance levels are adequate to meet application demands, and they provide the right type of storage availability with the right amount at the right time.
By using MAINVIEW SRM, storage managers can access information critical to managing application availability. You can monitor historical trends, forecast future requirements, and establish automation to detect, correct, and prevent problems.
BMC Software provides the following storage resource management products:
- MAINVIEW SRM Allocation
- MAINVIEW SRM Automation
- MAINVIEW SRM Reporting
- MAINVIEW SRM StopX37/II
Related products
Related products in the MAINVIEW family can dynamically optimize systems to improve performance, reduce resources, and simplify the management of complex mainframe environments.
MAINVIEW Batch Optimizer
MAINVIEW Batch Optimizer significantly compresses batch cycle time by accelerating the execution of batch jobs while making more efficient use of system resources. No JCL changes are required. MAINVIEW Batch Optimizer dramatically reduces I/O overhead, dynamically executes multiple batch jobs and job steps in parallel. Batch Optimizer also provides workload management capabilities by automatically distributing., routing, and executing batch jobs and job steps across the sysplex.
Energizer for CICS
Energizer for CICS matches, in real time, the system environment to the actual workload being processed. It dynamically manages and tunes CICS system parameters and resources to address performance issues before they cause problems. It decreases CPU utilization, possibly delaying hardware purchases, while increasing throughput.
InTune AQM Package
InTune™ pinpoints application program delays and presents this information for analysis through an easy-to-use, interactive interface. InTune provides detailed application-specific delay and tuning information that lets you quickly and effectively improve the performance of mission-critical applications. InTune measures application performance in both traditional and parallel sysplex environments.
APC for InTune automatically identifies tuning opportunities by analyzing SMF data and making comparisons with historical measurement records to identify applications that might be consuming more resources than normal. It then automatically targets those applications for further measurement with InTune. The true power of this solution is further enhanced by the correlation of this data to prioritize tuning efforts and increase the return on investment.
The Application Quality Management (AQM) solution comprises InTune and APC for InTune. AQM is a methodology for optimizing mainframe application performance throughout the application life cycle. AQM is also a proactive process that provides significant IT savings through deferred upgrades and resource optimization.
MAINVIEW for Performance Assurance
With the continuing growth of the mainframe, and its critical role in eBusiness applications, you need to be able to quickly and accurately predict resource requirements in order to deliver expected service levels for business applications. With cost reduction pressures on IT, you need to identify tuning options to postpone hardware acquisitions and improve service. MAINVIEW for Performance Assurance provides the information and insights to enable IT to meet both requirements in a cost-effective manner. With MAINVIEW for Performance Assurance you can
- automatically analyze performance data and build comprehensive models of the environment
- predict future requirements in response to “what if” questions involving changes
- predict the impact of tuning alternatives on performance, for reduced TCO
- graphically correlate chronic performance problems with historical performance information
- graphically report historical performance and publish to the web
- provide predictive analysis and performance reporting at the business application level, rather than the system level.
For more information
For further questions about how MAINVIEW can assist with your mainframe management needs, contact BMC Software at 1-800-841-2031 or see www.bmc.com.
Helping you maintain advantage
BMC Software Education Services offers a strategic investment for your business, maximizing the value for your employees and Business Service Management initiatives. Education ensures successful product implementation, promoting mastery of all product capabilities and highest productivity with your BMC Software solutions. To explore our education offerings, visit our web page at http://www.bmc.com/bmceducation, or contact BMC Software Education Services by telephone or e-mail:
- North America
Telephone: 800 574 4262
E-mail: education@bmc.com- Asia Pacific
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Telephone: 00800 26233822
E-mail: emea_education@bmc.comCopyright 2005 BMC Software, Inc., as an unpublished work. All rights reserved.
BMC Software, the BMC Software logos, and all other BMC Software product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of BMC Software, Inc.
IBM and DB2 are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation.
All other trademarks belong to their respective companies.
November 2005
About BMC Software
BMC Software, Inc. [NYSE:BMC], is a leading provider of enterprise management solutions that empower companies to manage their IT infrastructure from a business perspective. Delivering Business Service Management, BMC Software solutions span enterprise systems, applications, databases, and service management. Founded in 1980, BMC Software has offices worldwide and fiscal 2004 revenues of more than $1.4 billion. For more information about BMC Software, visit www.bmc.com.
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