Category Archives: Uncategorized

(Originally posted 2012-11-19.) With apologies to cat keepers everywhere (of whom I’m one). 🙂 Most of my reporting – when not graphical using GDDM – is created using Bookmaster. This looks in many ways like HTML and is another declarative markup language for text. It used to be what most IBM publications (including Redbooks) areContinue reading “Many Ways To Skin A Cat – Modernising Bookmaster / Script”

(Originally posted 2012-11-17.) About a year ago I posted: A Small Step For RMF, A Giant Leap For Self-Documenting Systems. A year on I’ve encountered some customer data that’s made me go "huh?", related to this. In the referenced post I mentioned R744FLPN, the Coupling Facility’s LPAR Number. For the first time I’ve seen dataContinue reading “Self-Documenting Systems (Actually Coupling Facilities) – One Year On”

(Originally posted 2012-10-13.) Hackday X was good clean fun yesterday – though I think it deserves more than one kiss. 🙂 Seriously, for once I think I have a hack that actually worked – at least up to a point. I called my entry “z/OS Batch Analytics Baby Steps” and I think that’s about right.Continue reading “Hackday X – Batch Analytics Baby Steps”

(Originally posted 2012-10-10.) Round about now you’d be expecting posts to be geared towards the recent zEC12 announcement, or perhaps CICS TS 5.1 or the DB2 11 Preview, or IDAA V3. So what this post is about will probably have slipped by unnoticed. After all you don’t spend all your time looking for obscure NewContinue reading “New CPU Information In SMF Type 30 Records”

(Originally posted 2012-10-04.) I don't know how many of you will've spotted this but there was a nice instrumentation enhancement in the recent System zEC12 announcement. It comes with the RMF support for CFLEVEL 18 (OA37826 and provides much more detail on paths to Coupling Facilities (CFs). Previously RMF reported channel path acronyms – oneContinue reading “System zEC12 CFLEVEL 18 RMF Instrumentation Improvements”

(Originally posted 2012-09-29.) Do you see what I did there? 🙂 On March 10th I published the slides to “I Know What You Did Last Summer” on Slideshare. Since then I’ve given the presentation thrice and in the process got to know it a little. (Yes I really do think creations take on a lifeContinue reading “I Know What You Did THIS Summer”

(Originally posted 2012-09-24.) This was originally going to be a different post about VSAM’s SMF 64 record, based on a customer situation. But it’s morphed into something else: A round up of "recent" enhancements to the SMF 64 record. "Recent" is a nice euphemism: Some of these enhancements are 15 years old. 🙂 But let’sContinue reading “Some Things You Might Not Know About VSAM SMF Type 64 Records”

(Originally posted 2012-09-19.) Prompted by Troy Coleman’s article zEC12 and zIIP Processors I thought I’d write about how I see the future for zAAPs. First, his article does a good job of covering the area. So I recommend you read it. Troy mentions the “zAAP on zIIP” function – which allows zAAP-eligible work to runContinue reading “Time To Move From zAAPs to zIIPs?”

(Originally posted 2012-09-18.) I’ve written extensively in the past about what you can glean about batch suites from SMF, most notably SMF Type 30. While I don’t believe SMF alone can give you the full dependency network (complete with validation) I’ve just added some analysis to my code that gets me a little closer. AsContinue reading “Games You Can Play With Timestamps”

(Originally posted 2012-09-13.) This post is about unusual ways of using the SMF 30 Usage Data information, some of which you’re certain to want if you’re managing z/OS systems’ performance. A long time ago I noticed character strings in SMF 30 records that looked like product names. (As is my wont I was looking atContinue reading “Another Usage Of Usage Information”