|
System operations, running as a NetView application, automates many system console operations and selected operator tasks such as startup, monitoring, recovery and shutdown of z/OS or OS/390 subsystems, components, and applications (including VTAM, RMF, JES2 or JES3, TSO, and others). System operations can also automate operator console messages, initiate timer based actions, and prevent critical z/OS resource shortages.
The SA z/OS System Operations base program can run on any processor supported by NetView for OS/390 1.4 or IBM Tivoli NetView for z/OS.
System operations exploits the NetView Management Console (NMC) to present graphic displays that can help your operator respond faster and more effectively in situations where human initiation, monitoring or intervention is needed. With system operations, your enterprise resources such as systems, jobs, and DASD appear onscreen as pictorial icons, thus eliminating the need for an operator to watch and interpret text messages rolling across the screen to understand the general health of critical resources.
In addition to its workstation user interfaces, system operations provides host-based user interfaces, through a set of NetView commands and NetView view panel responses and also through its Status Display Facility -- an alternative method to monitor applications running on target systems from a focal point NetView.
You specify to SA z/OS what resources you wish to automate and monitor, and what your policies are for automation and monitoring, in an ISPF dialog. Information that it collects from you in the dialogs is stored in a policy database. Several sample policy databases are shipped with the product, for example one for a simple four-system sysplex and one for a sysplex where automatic restart management (ARM) is exploited. You can use the samples to get a quick start on customizing SA z/OS for your systems. The policy data base for many focal point and target systems is normally created on a single system and shared with other systems or sent to them.
In System Automation for z/OS, system operations has the role of supporting application automation. Because of this, you may have questions on its relation to other IBM automation tools: the
Workload Manager for z/OS (WLM) and automatic restart manager (ARM), as well as the
IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler (TWS) product.
WLM focuses on achieving customer business goals, expressed in service level agreement terms, by managing the real-time consumption of system resources by the currently active workload. ARM focuses on restarting subsystems, components, and applications on some system in a sysplex, specifically so a restarted application can free resources it was consuming. TWS schedules the customer's repetitive workload and manages interdependencies between concurrent and successive jobs. It can be thought of as managing the passage of a work-item through the successive processes of an assembly line. It may well be the one to schedule the workload for which WLM is matching customer goals.
System Automation for z/OS focuses on automating the full life cycle of z/OS subsystems or applications, including their interdependencies, throughout their transitions from startup to shutdown. That automation includes notification to operators of problems in the course of that cycle.
System operations has awareness of z/OS automatic restart management, so that restart actions are properly coordinated. TWS has awareness of System operations RODM objects.
System operation features
System Automation for z/OS includes automation features of system operations for CICS, IMS, and TWS.
The CICS feature allows automation to start and stop CICS based on service periods, to monitor and control local and remote CICS regions, to monitor and recover interregion and intersystem communications, and to monitor CICS applications.
The IMS feature provides a single point of control for multiple IMS regions. Like the CICS feature, it also supports service periods. It supports multiple environment types (ARM and non-ARM, XRF and non-XRF) for starting, stopping, and recovery. It provides message and state/action pair automation. And it supports System Automation for z/OS operator access to most master terminal operator functions.
The TWS feature allows you to tie TWS's sophisticated calendar capabilities to System operations and exploit it to control the NetView environment. It also allows the automation of normal operation and recovery of TWS itself.
Together, these features give you the ability to implement complex production scenarios, like TWS requesting from SA z/OS to shutdown orderly CICS and posting back success after the final termination message has occurred. After TWS has executed its plan to e.g archive the databases, it requests from SA z/OS to start CICS and all needed jobs again when the next service window begins.
All three automation features provide NetView host-based user interfaces.
| 
