IBM i Performance Concerns? Supermon to the Rescue!

October 14, 2014 Alex Woodie

A new release of the Supermon performance monitoring tool from SoftLanding Systems should make it easier for organizations to ensure production IBM i workloads run without disruption.

Supermon for iSeries is a real-time performance monitoring tool that UNICOM Global acquired with its 2009 acquisition of Macro 4. The software enables customers to monitor real-time conditions, and compare them against historical averages.

The new release of Supermon for iSeries brings several new features that should help users. For starters, the product can now store historical data on external databases instead of just DB2 for i.

“This is a significant benefit as monthly performance data can sometimes run to several terabytes, taking up precious disk space on the IBM i platform,” says Jim Fisher, SoftLanding’s operations manager.

Customers also get new charts that deliver the capability to extrapolate performance trends. This will enable customers to perform capacity planning exercises for sizing new systems and upgrades.

Supermon has also been equipped with a new job scheduler for performance reports. The reports can be scheduled to run on daily, weekly, and monthly schedules, and automatically email reports to the appropriate users.

The scheduling feature will work particularly well for large reporting jobs, which often consume substantial system resources, Fisher says. These reports “can be configured to run overnight or outside of work hours in order to minimize the impact on business operations,” he adds.

The new release doesn’t have a version number associated with it besides the generic “version 100” name that SoftLanding uses with all of its products. In addition to Supermon for iSeries, the company sells Supermon for iDisk product for tracking the growth of DASD and performing physical file reorganizations. The company also sells the related Automon family of products, which were also obtained with the Macro 4 acquisition.