Released on = March 26, 2007, 8:19 am

Press Release Author = CCSS

Industry = Computers

Press Release Summary = March 22, 2007 - CCSS, QSystem Monitor V12, the performance
monitoring and reporting solution from IBM System i specialist CCSS, now features
in-depth, real-time disk monitoring capabilities that answer some of the most urgent
DASD issues facing system i shops today including ASP and temporary storage
monitoring.

Press Release Body = DASD's role as the system fall guy, taking the brunt of looping
jobs or applications no longer needs to be the expensive, catch-all solution to
system ills. Rather than throwing increased capacity at the system to accommodate
problems, QSystem Monitor's V12 turns the equation around and allows operators to
identify and resolve threats to DASD in real-time so disk is not used unnecessarily.


A new level of freedom and flexibility to monitor objects that could impact DASD
gives operators fresh insight into system resource use. For example, shops running
High Availability solutions can now monitor journal receivers (such as the audit
journal) in real-time and attach a threshold that will alert them if levels are
breached. Similarly, important physical files in third party applications, such as
payroll, can now be monitored. Data queues, distribution queues, object sizes as
well as file record counts, deletions and percentages now give new scope to
real-time problem identification.

Object monitoring helps operators to guard against problems that could arise around
specific objects and impact system resource if left unchecked. V12's ASP and
temporary storage monitoring takes care of unforeseen DASD issues that could degrade
performance and impact users without the time consuming requirement of interrogating
individual jobs on the system. Without close monitoring of ASP's, overflow into a
central ASP, caused by an undetected problem on the system, could leave data
unprotected and at risk of being lost altogether should the system crash.
Independent ASP's, which are unable to overflow into another ASP, can also be
monitored to detect when they are reaching maximum desired capacity. At a glance
monitoring of ASP's and physical disk units can be defined in several ways with
real-time monitoring of the percentage of ASP Busy Unit; number of ASP Busy Unit;
ASP Space Free; ASP Space Used and ASP Status, to name a few - this makes the
pinpointing and resolution of problems a speedy process.

Typically, even innocent system changes can cause the auxiliary storage to surge
without immediate understanding as to what has caused the surge. Seemingly small
security changes that so often follow an audit, such as revoking access to a
particular file, can cause a job to loop, generate spool files and ultimately send
the auxiliary storage soaring. These situations, whilst not unavoidable altogether,
are able to be identified in real-time before they have an opportunity to impact on
resource and users.

Temporary storage issues can be overcome by creating a dedicated group monitor. This
can be as simple as a single bar in the online monitor that will alert operators of
threshold breaches requiring investigation. In this case, clicking on the bar will
show the individual subsystems and the total MB usage of each. Operators can then
immediately create a new group monitor to detect all the jobs running in that sub
system and view the temporary storage usage of each. By 'floating' the view, any
number of jobs that reside in that subsystem can be easily viewed and sorted into
high usage order for immediate problem identification. This entire process pinpoints
problems in a couple of minutes, ensuring operators can be pro-active to their
temporary storage issues. Prior to this new flexibility in QSystem Monitor's V12,
operators had no simple means of reporting through OS/400 to show temporary storage
usage and were forced to investigate a painstaking one-by-one analysis of what could
be hundreds of jobs in any particular sub system. The flexibility of V12 gives
operators the option to monitor temporary storage by job, user, subsystem or even
the entire system.

QSystem Monitor's disk monitoring capabilities form part of the overall performance
solution that also covers system monitoring, network monitoring, job monitoring and
availability monitoring to complete V12's core performance monitoring and reporting
components.


Web Site = http://www.ccssltd.com

Contact Details = Tarnya Franks
CCSS (Europe) Ltd
6 The Courtyard Gillingham Bus Park, Gillingham, Kent. ME8 0NZ
tarnya.franks@ccsseurope.co.uk
+44 (0) 1634 370 444