Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition--When OneWorld Jobs Go Bad: A Centerfield Technology Solution

In the J.D. Edwards OneWorld environment (recently renamed PeopleSoft EnterpriseOne), it can be very difficult to track down performance problems when an OS/400 server is used as the database. Because of limitations in OneWorld's client/server architecture, it becomes next to impossible to correlate users with their DB2/400 jobs when those jobs malfunction. Performance tool vendor Centerfield Technology offered a partial solution before, but says it has finally solved the problem completely with insure/MONITOR for OneWorld 5.0.

In a traditional OS/400 application, a system administrator would use the Work with Active Jobs (WRKACTJB) command as a starting point for tracking down the offending job when performance problems rear their nasty little heads. The WRKACTJB command doesn't provide a solution for the 1,000 to 1,300 OS/400 shops running the former J.D. Edwards' cross-platform, client/server OneWorld ERP suite, says Mark Holm, chief technology officer and founder of Rochester, Minnesota, based Centerfield Technology.

The problem in tracking down problem jobs in OS/400-OneWorld environments is tied to the three-tiered, cross-platform architecture that J.D. Edwards used to build the ERP application, Holm says. The majority of OneWorld shops use a Windows-based Citrix MetaFrame server as the application server. When an OS/400 server is used as the database layer, Citrix will start anywhere from five to eight ODBC jobs per user to access DB2/400.

Here's where the problems start. When Citrix starts these ODBC jobs, it assigns them a generic user ID that is not tied to the actual user, which makes it extremely difficult to correlate a true end user with a job using the WRKACTJB command, and it's next to impossible when there is a large number of users, Holm says. Companies that use the older version of J.D. Edwards ERP software, WorldSoftware, do not run into this problem, because it was designed from the ground up to run on a single platform: OS/400.

Centerfield tried to address this problem in prior releases of the tool (which was then called OneWorld/MONITOR) by allowing users to correlate one of the OneWorld jobs with an actual user. The administrator could then use IP addresses to connect the user to the four to seven other jobs that might be bad. But this technique required manual processes and was time-consuming, which made it less than ideal. Another workaround some OneWorld shops have used is to create a second, or "shadow," list of OS/400 user profiles, but, again, this technique is error-prone and time-consuming, and could pose unwanted security risks, Holm says.

Earlier this month, Centerfield introduced an updated version of the product, insure/MONITOR for OneWorld 5.0, which provides full visibility into OneWorld users and all of their correlating ODBC jobs on the OS/400 server. For obvious reasons, Centerfield is not disclosing just how it works. But work, it does, and it was just what the doctor ordered for Hays Personnel.

Hays Personnel is one of the United Kingdom's largest temporary agencies, connecting workers with 24,000 jobs at any one time. The company, which is obligated by English law to pay its temps within three days of submitting a timecard, processes 10,000 timecards every day, and cuts £1 million in paychecks every night. At the center of this £1 billion plus enterprise is OneWorld running on an eight-processor AS/400 Model 830 with 40 GB of memory and 750 GB of DASD. "It basically runs the whole business, so we need to be on top of the situation, day in, day out," says Ranbeer Johal, Hays' iSeries technical team manager. "Performance is definitely a key issue for us."

On a typical day, up to 350 people will be logged on to the system, and Ranbeer will spend up to three hours troubleshooting problems that the help desk can't solve--often because of the difficulty in correlating users with jobs in OneWorld. "It's a big headache for the first line of support people to get any kind of indication of what the problem is," he says. "You go to WRKACTJB, and you try to guess. But there are 3,000 ODBC jobs running at any one time, so you don't know where to start, you really don't."

J.D. Edwards' performance tools do not address this problem, so Ranbeer searched the Internet for a third-party performance tool that did. He didn't find what he was looking for, until he discovered Centerfield's insure/MONITOR product line, which features a graphical interface. After talking with the company, he agreed to be a beta site for the latest release (5.0) of the insure/MONITOR for OneWorld product.

Ranbeer says the results have been very positive. "Without this product, I would spend 15 to 20 minutes talking with the user," he says. "Now I don't waste my time getting basic information to the help desk." By freeing his time, and making more efficient use of the 100 Hays workers entering timecard data into the system, Ranbeer estimates Hays will save £70,000, or about $118,000, with insure/MONITOR for OneWorld 5.0.

Of course, correlating users with their jobs is only the beginning of what insure/MONITOR for OneWorld can do. The gist of the product is performance-tuning, and identifying problem jobs is the starting point for using other techniques to fix the problem, hopefully by using more refined techniques and finesse than just ending the job. As Centerfield sales executive Jon Dahl puts it, the product helps you "fine-tune your system with a screw driver instead of a nine-pound hammer."

To improve SQL performance, insure/MONITOR for OneWorld can help users by building database indexes. The software also gives users greater visibility and statistics about communication flows, which could help identify performance problems stemming from excessive FTP use. The product also includes file lock detection capabilities, which would normally require you to purchase another Centerfield product, called lock/DETECTOR. The insure/MONITOR for OneWorld also gives users the capability to analyze storage usage, which would normally require the purchase of another product, disk/HUNTER.

The insure/MONITOR for OneWorld 5.0 is shipping now. Licenses are $20,000, which includes the first 100 users. Each user beyond the first 100 costs $25. For more information, go to www.centerfieldtechnology.com.