proactive AS400 monitoring–out of the box

I have a client that wants to do some more pro-active monitoring of their AS/400.  They want to know if something has failed before their users tell them – innovative!  Different!  Forward thinking!  Let’s be honest, if you read the doco, there are never any problems on an AS400 and this is a waste of time – but maybe not!

I did a little bit a research and I’m amazed what is available “out of the box”.  With some smarts about what to do and how JDE works on the AS/400 – monitoring is fairly easy.

There are 5 main categories of monitoring:

These are available from your “Management Central” location within the system I navigator.

What are you going to monitor, here is a start:

• Disk usage
• CPU usage
• Errors in certain job logs (wow, this is GREAT) [tell me if I get
• Errors in QHST log file, errors in any log file
• Message in queues

All very possible given the above frame work.  You can just right click and start adding them.  We have our AS400 sending emails when certain disk, CPU thresholds are met.  We have it sending emails when backups are complete and also if there are certain messages in QHST (

SYSTEM

Note that I look at what is available (with Graph history), and then add monitors for things that I want to monitor

FILE

You can use a file monitor to notify you whenever a selected file has changed,reached a specified size, or for specified text strings.

QHST for any system problems (CPF1124 – Job start)

JDE log files for specific messages / text strings

JOB

Check jobs for certain messages in job logs

Check existence of jobs, CPU usage of job, count of jobs, thread count etc.

If a UBE is killing the system, you could actually give it lower priority – this is POWERFUL!

You could move a job out of a queue if it was taking too long, this is VERY powerful (with the use of replacement variables)

Message

Monitor for messages in a single message queue.

 

If your monitors are not auto starting

Restarting failed monitoring on the 400

you can manually select the option for “Restart on failed systems” – but this is a pain.  Fix the problem permanently!

Then choose “Connection”

 

In my research found the following helpful:

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/iseries/v5r4/index.jsp?topic=%2Frzahx%2Frzahxmonparent.htm

System iSystems Management Working with Management Central monitors Version 5 Release 4

This was also a VERY good presentation http://www.lisug.org/presentations/Monitoring%20System%20Performance%20Sept2012.pdf