RE: High AS400 Storage

I've used both of these products and both have their good points. For
Help Systems be sure you activate the module that was the favorite of Al
Barsa, God rest his soul. That would be the *SPENDMONEY* module, it's
very, very expensive especially when upgrading and they tend to not be
very willing to sharpen their pencil! S4I is okay but their lack of a
GUI is a significant minus for the product. Any analysis will need to
be done through green bar reports.


Paul Fenstermacher
Certified Specialist - i5 System Administration
Bass Pro Shops
417-873-5424 d
417-429-7694 c
paulf@xxxxxxxxxxx

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of bll1981
Sent: Sunday, July 18, 2010 11:21 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: High AS400 Storage

Darell,

While I don't disagree with thinking Vision/iTera/Mimix should aid here,
truth
is they don't and most likely never will unless you purchase their
monitoring
module. Lets face it, the iTera product is not intended to monitor
system
storage issues, even if they indirectly caused the problem. All that
being
said, I think you have a few options here.........

1) Look at Helpsystems Robot Space product. Robot Space can track real
time DASD
growth over time and you can alert yourself when that growth breaches
certain
configurable monitoring metrics such as X% of total system DASD over Y
time, or
Z amount of storage over Y time. This is actually just a small piece of
Robot
Space, as its real value is storage reporting and maintenance tool. You
could
keep summary statistics for each library on your system for however long
you
want. Go back and compare, extrapolate, trend, or whatever against
current disk
consumption reports. My favorite feature is Robot Space's GUI client
that works
well with your Windows clipboard. This means you can retrieve statistics
and
copy directly into Excel. (Very much appreciated for those Excel
analytical
buffs like myself.) Bottom line, much better than QAEZDISK.

2) As an alternative to Robot Space, S4iSystems has something called
Disk
Hunter. This product was designed specifically for the purposes of
solving your
issue, so it doesn't do all that stuff Robot Space does unless you
purchase
additional modules. If you don't want all that other stuff in Robot
Space, Disk
Hunter would a great pick that will also save you some money. (I am a
fan of
both companies/products, so I will not advocate for one over the other.
Each
product has unique intrinsic benefits relative to your issues.)

3) You custom write some applications that do what you need. Basically,
you
would need a mechanism to retrieve system statistics every X interval
and store
that in a database file indexed by time stamp. Next, have another
program that
runs behind the retrieve function for the purposes putting the data
collected
through logic that compares current readings against past entries. That
same
program would then decide whether or not, and how to alert operations or

whomever.

Good luck!




________________________________
From: Darell Wheeler <darellwheeler@xxxxxxxx>
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Sun, July 18, 2010 8:53:17 AM
Subject: High AS400 Storage

Hi,

Yesterday the storage level increased drastically to 96%.At that time I
could
not see any extract job running on the system.After the developers
cleared some
files and storage was brought down I did an outfile of all journals in
user
libraries.What I saw was that there were around 160 GB of Journals
created on
the system the previous night.

I have a question here:

Is there a way on the AS400 system/iTera HA to check at any point of
time if
large Journals are being created .Any specific AS400 command /iTera menu
or
iTera job which will help locating this.Also in such scenarios when the
storage
is increasing quickly,which command can actually help me in locating the
exact
reason for the rise in storage

This would be very helpful since if the storage is on the rise we can
check if
this is happening due to creation of large journalled files/user running

extracts interactively etc .

Many Thanks