IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - IBM i digital edition, February 2009 - 18

ÆDkZgVaa!lZh^bean]VkZWZiiZgXdcigdad[djghnhiZbh#Ç ÆFWkb9h[["_dj[]hWj[Zi[Ykh_jocWdW][h"D_ffed;nfh[iiKI7 toward the multipartition environment we work within and didn’t fit in with the way we operate.” One vendor stood out from the others. CCSS had the tools Nippon Express sought, including QSystem Monitor, QMessage Monitor and QRemote Control. All of them come with a GUI (although a green-screen interface is also available), work in multipartition environments and, specific to Nippon Express USA, fit into the company’s operational environment. Working with CCSS, and after undergoing some tool training, the company began rapidly deploying these solutions, knowing that, according to Cree, they “would improve everybody’s work and allow us to be able to respond to problems on a much quicker basis.” This deployment took place over the spring of 2007, and the company went live with the tools shortly thereafter. “It was a pleasant surprise to see how easy it was to see how much was going on with our systems,” Cree says. “But that brought up another issue. Because of the volume of inquiry messages we were receiving via QMessage Monitor from each partition, we needed to find a way to decide what was critical and what was trivial. Thankfully, this tool allowed us to decide which inquiry messages we wanted to see and which we wanted to ignore. Otherwise, we would have been swamped with messages and not necessarily know the ones we should respond to.” Additionally, QMessage Monitor users can set up the solution to send, for example, any EDI-related messages to the EDI programming group. This type of message-level parsing helps ensure that critical messages are sent to the proper personnel so they can take immediate action. “What we did was use QMessage Monitor to create groups of people to whom we should route specific types of messages,” Cree explains. To illustrate that point, he recalls a recent hard-drive failure that resulted in an inquiry message. That message was routed to appropriate personnel and, on the same day—a Saturday—the drive was quickly replaced. “We’ve programmed the QMessage Monitor to turn issues like hard-drive failures into inquiry messages,” he says. “We’ve come a long way since that 30-day failure we had in the past.” While QMessage Monitor is focused on system-related messages, QSystem Monitor indicates how the systems are performing. For example, the tool can notify the appropriate IT employees of excessive CPU use so they can take action to reduce it. Similarly, it can generate messages if disk space is nearing peak capacity. “We can even monitor controllers that go down or services that aren’t operating 18 FEBRUARY 2009 ibmsystemsmag.com/ibmi correctly,” Cree says. “For instance, we can monitor our Domino* server ports to make sure that our Domino servers are operating correctly.” As with QMessage Monitor, QSystem Monitor messages can be routed to the appropriate personnel, who can take prompt action should anything occur. This type of messaging is enhanced with QRemote Control, which can route messages to onsite terminals, offsite PCs and portable devices. For example, if something goes awry, a message can be sent to a smartphone. If the problem is relatively simple to resolve, the message recipient can answer the message with a “Retry or Cancel,” as Cree puts it, to correct the issue. If the problem is more involved than that, the recipient can log onto the system from a remote workstation and respond to the situation. As a result, IT workers are no longer tethered to the company’s systems, waiting for messages to appear on their consoles or finding a message on a Monday related to a problem that occurred on a Saturday. Now, they can take near-immediate action. “In the past, we checked on Saturday and Sunday mornings for messages, but that solution wasn’t always reliable and people often didn’t know what to do when they got a message. With QRemote Control, we don’t have to worry about that anymore,” Cree says. 7ZiiZg8dcigda Before deploying the CCSS solutions, Nippon Express USA’s IT personnel had to manually check for messages. Now, much of that work is automatic. If something goes wrong in the company’s IT department, IT personnel can quickly respond, whether they’re in the office or not. And thanks to this automation, the company estimates that system operators are spending 87 percent less time monitoring systems. This means programmers can now spend more time innovating and helping customers. Cree indicates that the CCSS tools have already paid for themselves, in improved productivity, the prevention of unplanned downtime and better allocation of system resources. As he notes, “QSystem Manager allows us, for example, to view disk-space usage on a very detailed level, and if disk space is being overused, we can identify how and get it remedied. Overall, we simply have better control of our systems.” Jim Utsler, IBM Systems Magazine senior writer, has been covering technology for more than a decade. Jim can be reached at jutsler@ msptechmedia.com.

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IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - IBM i digital edition, February 2009

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