CCSS Adds DASD Monitoring to QSystem Monitor V12

Published: March 27, 2007

by Alex Woodie

CCSS has added real-time disk monitoring to QSystem Monitor version 12, its systems management utility for i5/OS servers. With the new DASD monitoring function, QSystem Monitor customers will get alerts to disk problems, before they slow applications, or worse.

While robust, the System i's DASD resources are not immune to problems. An innocent change to an audit function, or a tweak of a journaling function, could spawn a chain of events, eventually culminating in surge of auxiliary storage pool (ASP) usage and, potentially, a crashed machine. Considering the cost of DASD from IBM, most shops don't have the luxury of running with gobs of extra DASD, making it even more important to manage one's DASD efficiently.

A new feature in CCSS' QSystem Monitor version 12 unveiled last week can help users monitor their DASD usage to get the most bang for their buck, and to quickly identify sudden DASD usage spikes before they create additional problems.

While QSystem Monitor already offered a number of disk-related monitoring functions among the hundreds of out-of-the-box monitoring functions, it has added several more real-time monitors, including the capability to monitor journal receivers, ASPs and physical disk units by ASP busy unit, by ASP space free, by ASP space used, and by ASP status.

When one of the monitors exceeds a given threshold, it alerts the administrator to the problem. The administrator can then use QSystem Monitor's graphical tools to find the cause of the problem by drilling down several more views, until the problem job is discovered. In prior releases, administrators would have had to hunt through potentially hundreds of jobs in various subsystems to find the problem, according to CCSS.

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