Centerfield Tightens Noose Around iSeries Performance Problems

Published: January 24, 2006

by Alex Woodie

iSeries shops that want detailed logs of system events leading up to performance problems should check out the new release of Centerfield Technology's insure/MONITOR. Previously, the tool only worked in real time, but with version 5.3, Centerfield has added the capability to offload data about user and job activity to a separate database, enabling IT pros to track down performance problems on their own time.

When a performance problem strikes your PC, chances are a simple re-boot takes care of the offending bits and gets you back up and running in a jiffy. However, things are rarely so simple in the corporate data center, where servers are expected to be up 24/7, and a problem affecting one database or application can have a ripple effect, spreading to other applications and to hundreds of users, slowing down productivity and eating into profits. And even if these organizations could IPL their critical iSeries servers, it's doubtful that would do much good, anyway.

This is the typical scenario where Centerfield Technology's insure/MONITOR comes into play. The tool is based on the OS/400 command Work With Active Job (WRKACTJOB), but instead of a green-screen interface, insure/MONITOR displays this information in a graphical interface that lets administrators sort and correlate the data in a more meaningful context. The product also brings additional information to the table, such as actual user IDs, which are lost in the mess of different protocols used by distributed client-server applications. It is for this reason the company has taken to calling insure/MONITOR "WRKACTJOB on Viagra."

With this month's release of insure/MONITOR 5.3, Centerfield has added new logging capabilities that will eliminate the need for administrators to spend large amounts of time by their consoles, waiting to see if, for example, a given performance problem might be related to a full system backup scheduled for Saturday night. With logging enabled, administrators can now view performance data related to recurring problems at their leisure, and spend their weekends in pursuit of more value-added endeavors. Maybe they should start calling the new release "WRKACTJOB on Cialis," (since that medication is sometimes marketed as "The Weekedn Pill.")

This new logging feature provides an immediate benefit to iSeries administrators, says Jon Dahl, a marketing manager with Centerfield. "If he knows the problem takes place every Monday morning at 5 a.m., he doesn't want to sit there and watch the system. Now, he can audit what he needs to audit." This new feature was developed for a particular customer, and is now in use at 20 or 30 sites, he says.

Centerfield has included a half-dozen or so pre-canned reports to help users of insure/MONITOR get up and running with the new auditing feature. Customers can also write their own queries against the insure/MONITOR log, which is iSeries-resident.

Besides providing time-shift functionality, the new logging feature can be used for long-term tracking of system resources by particular users or specific jobs. This can bring benefits in the area of capacity planning and ensuring sufficient hardware resources for expanding existing application deployments, or for getting an early indication of performance characteristics of new applications. And although Centerfield isn't marketing insure/MONITOR as a security tool, administrators could also use the new feature to see who is logging onto the system, and at what times.

One other major new feature added to insure/MONITOR 5.3 is the capability to detect when commitment control thresholds have been exceeded. Centerfield says this will come in particularly handy for organizations using IBM's Save While Active command, because exceptionally long commit control cycles will sometimes cause a backup to fail when using the Save While Active command. iSeries shops that have used Save While Active to reduce downtime have been surprised to find they have no backups, which puts the organization at considerable risk in the case of a disaster.

These new features have been added to both versions of insure/MONITOR, including the standard client-server edition, and one designed specifically for Oracle's EnterpriseOne ERP application (see "When OneWorld Jobs Go Bad: A Centerfield Technology Solution" for more on the travails of tracking down performance problems in these challenging IT environments).

Looking forward, Centerfield expects to ship a new version of insure/MONITOR during the second half of 2006. The company is playing around with the idea of bringing together the functionality contained in several of its database tools, such as disk/HUNTER, insure/INDEX, and insure/ANALYSIS, to enable autonomic detection and correction of performance problems, Dahl says.

This should be an exciting year for the Rochester, Minnesota, company, especially with the long-awaited return yesterday of Mark Holm, Centerfield's founder and its chief technology officer. Holm, a DB2/400 expert, had been working at IBM's Rochester lab for a couple of years, but his stint ended Friday.

insure/MONITOR 5.3 is available now with a starting price of $7,500 per iSeries partition, or $10,000 for use in an unlimited number of partitions on a single iSeries machine. For more information, visit www.centerfieldtechnology.com.