Head's Up: Job Watcher Can Mess With LPARs

Published: February 2, 2009

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Our good friend Doug Bidwell, over at Power Systems reseller DLB Associates and who certainly still calls himself a '400 reseller, wanted to give you all a head's up about some potential issues IBM has found with the Job Watcher performance monitoring tool for the OS/400 V5R3, i5/OS V5R4, and i 6.1 operating systems when running inside LPARs when it is collecting SQL information on the system.

The iDoctor suite of tools, which include Job Watcher, are often used by IBM's Rochester tech support team or by resellers to support their i platform customers. The iDoctor team sent out the following notice, which you should be aware of:

"This e-mail is being sent to inform you that Hiper APAR's have been created for a recently discovered defect with the existing Job Watcher performance tool that can, in rare instances, severely impact the partition it is running in. (Please see https://www-912.ibm.com/i_dir/idoctor.nsf for a complete list of recommended PTF's for Pex Analyzer and Job Watcher). Final PTF approval is expected in late February. The releases impacted are V5R3 (with either V5R3M0 or V5R3M5 LIC) and V5R4 (with either V5R4M0 or V5R4M5 LIC)."

"SE36483, MA37457 and MA37460 have been created to address an issue where running Job Watcher AND collecting SQL information on a very busy system can result in abnormal temporary storage growth in the jobs being examined. The temporary storage growth could be very large, to the point of possibly filling up the System ASP and thereby causing the partition to abnormally end."

"This scenario can be avoided by NOT collecting SQL information when running Job Watcher. No other Job Watcher functions are impacted. If you have any questions on this e-mail please send your questions or comments to iDoctor@us.ibm.com"

Keep your eyes peeled for HIPER PTF patches in February that will fix this issue. Don't forget: Every week, Bidwell puts together the System i PTF Guide, which we publish as part of our Four Hundred stack of newsletters.

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