Today’s businesses are highly dependent on non-interruptible operations. Disruptions caused by downtimes for any length of time, cannot be afforded anymore. Performance Analysts and Operations Managers are constantly on the lookout for indications in performance, operations, and system health data to determine if there are signs of looming problems on the horizon. What is the impact or severity of these problems – are they critical, or do they have a minor impact? Do they need to be addressed immediately or can they be slotted as a low priority issue?
A key person in this process would be the Capacity Planner. They rely on the performance data of a system to determine if the existing resources and configurations are adequate to support the current and future demands and if not, determine what changes need to be made to plan for capacity needs for the future. Some questions a capacity planner would typically ask are:
- Can the current resources meet current and future peak demands?
- Does the environment have reasonable extra capacity for unplanned events?
- Is the CPU hardware configured to optimize these scenarios?
- Where are the observed bottlenecks in the environment? (For example, if there is a DASD I/O bottleneck, then upgrading the processor capacity may not provide the improvement hoped for)
The nature of modern hybrid applications and workloads mean there is a greater need to ensure the increasingly complex architecture is able to scale and support the business. Modern performance management and capacity planning reporting solutions need to provide actionable information in a timely and concise manner.
Take advantage of the Health Metric Scorecard
The latest enhancement to IBM Z Performance and Capacity Analytics v3.1 is the Health Metric Scorecard. A single, easy to understand report that presents the overall health of the managed system across nearly 40 components covering everything from the Coupling Facility to LPAR details and everything in between including System, Memory, Workload, DASD, and other rule groups.
The Health Metric Scorecard applies detailed logic rules to the collected performance data for these components, based on best practices and IBM recommendations. The report indicates, via a heat map color code, any areas of concern related to the performance of the system for which data was collected, based on the underlying best practice rules.
Scorecard Layout
The health summary of the components is shown based on system level data (system performance variables, workload variables and I/O information) collected over the current day and previous 5 days. Applying the IBM recommended best practice rules based to indicate the performance health of the system image, based on a color code, the performance health of the system image, where a green status indicates that the performance health is OK, yellow status indicates a caution, and a red status is a warning.
Health metric information for this rule would give more context about this status. Drill down is available to further analyze the variables that are considered in this rule and their status to understand more about what is going on with the system that has created a RED status:
Additionally, the health metric scorecard can display a 6-day view of the health status in order to conduct a trend analysis of the health of any specific component of concern.
This type of view may help answer questions such as “Is the system normally this busy at this specific time of day, based on what I am seeing from the past few days?” and the like. Further drill down is available from a summary view to a detailed view of the performance metrics for the component in question.
Now try the Health Metric Scorecard for yourself
The new IBM Z Performance and Capacity Analytics Health Metric Scorecard delivers key measurements that can provide current system assurance validation. The measurements that are part of the scorecard are SYSPLEX, LPAR, Logical System, memory, Workload (such as delays and utilization/Service Class), channel paths, and DASD response time.
If you’d like to see more about the scorecard, please join us on April 25 for a short webinar where we will demonstrate the capabilities and dive deeper into the insights that are available. You can register for this free event here.
IBM Z Performance and Capacity Analytics has over 450 other web-based reports that augment the detail behind the new Health Metric Scorecard. Please do reach out to your IBM representative for a demonstration and discussion, including the opportunity to see what the reports look like with your own data.