Hardware and Software Cost Control

EPV for z/OS Resources provides a complete vision of the “health” of all critical resources of your systems, especially those shared amongst different z/OS systems such as processors (including zIIP and crypto), disks, physical control units, coupling facilities and channels. An integrated Enterprise view is presented and identifies any saturation points or performance efficiency problems. The time period and resource causing the bottleneck can be easily identified by our intuitive use of colour coding. EPV for z/OS SW-Cost vision supports both the TFP and WLC IBM software costs policies, providing all the necessary metrics to manage the MSU utilization both at the system and subsystem levels. EPV reports both the total and the highest “4-hours rolling average” value, used by IBM to charge its monthly fee.

Performance Analysis know-how embedded

EPV for z/OS Workloads provides a complete vision of all the workloads running on your systems. Utilizing extensive drill-down capabilities, you can explore workload performance and consumption at the address space or transaction level. For Batch, CICS, DDF, IMS, MQ and WebSphere workloads, throughput, consumption and response times are identified for critical jobs and transactions. EPV for z/OS Trend vision provides daily and monthly productivity and resource consumption trends at the system and workload levels. This will assist in the understanding of workload growth and its impact on your systems. An advanced statistical methodology spots positive or negative growth trends that lie outside of a normal distribution. Regression analysis is also performed to estimate CPU latent demand for saturated systems.

Automatic Control of Configuration Changes

EPV for z/OS Configuration provides a detailed report of the hardware and software configuration for the z/OS and OS/390 environments, including the total DASD space by provider and physical control unit. EPV provides a global view of shared resources, such as machines (CEC), Coupling Facilities and Storage Processors by correlating data produced by different sources and systems. EPV for z/OS audits configuration changes at the hardware, system and software level.

Access to available data

EPV for z/OS uses standard measures normally available in the z/OS environments and supports various sources, such as ITRM (IT Resource Management), MXG (Merrill’s eXpanded Guide) or native SMF, RMF and IMS data. EPV optimises data collection by using existing summarised data, limiting the number of variables, using intelligent filters and avoiding data duplication and redundancy. The product’s architecture is modular and user-friendly. EPV can be installed on most of the popular hardware and software platforms available on the market.

Using “de facto” Standard Technologies

All reports are produced in simple static HTML pages published on a server of your choice and can be accessed by your favourite internet browser. All the tables provided in the reports can be exported individually or together to a MS-Excel spreadsheet.

Architecture

EPV for z/OS architecture is based on the following three layers:
• An interface to collect input data;
• An engine to correlate and aggregate data;
• An engine to produce HTML pages;

The EPV Performance database is based on standard SAS files, SQL relational databases or data sets in the Hadoop Distributed File System.

Requirements

EPV for z/OS has no pre-requisites; it’s an “out of the box” solution which integrates a light version of the EPV zParser product to interpret the needed SMF records and all the other input data required.

EPV for z/OS can also run on top of SAS. In this case the requirements are:
• Availability of a SAS System Base module at least on a PC;
• Availability of one of the following products: SAS ITRM, MXG.