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Announcing z/OS Change Tracker

  
As IBM continues to provide a suite of robust tools to help system programmers manage z/OS, IBM intends to offer z/OS Change Tracker, a comprehensive configuration change management tool for tracking, controlling, and managing changes in software, as a priced feature of z/OS V2.5.

Data Protection: IBM z/OS Change Tracker provides monitoring and protection of critical libraries. Locked members cannot be changed without permission granted by the Administrator.

Data Recovery: Automatic backups are generated whenever a monitored member is changed, and an optional email notification can be provided. Members in monitored data sets can be restored to previous versions.

Audit Support: Out-of-the-box audit reports of monitored data sets indicate the event type (add, update, delete, rename, zap), who made the change, and when.
With a simple control interface to identify, manage, and audit configuration files, IBM z/OS Change Tracker is planned to help clients with all aspects of the change configuration management experience, including software management and resiliency. Today, monitoring hundreds of configuration files can be a manual and tedious process making it difficult to do without the right tools and leaving the potential for undesired system configuration changes. In the future with z/OS Change Tracker, system programmers can easily identify and control configuration assets, and with a planned automatic backup capability for configuration assets, they can also support a resilient environment. z/OS Change Tracker is also planned to help system programmers quickly understand the differences between two groups of data sets or volumes to see if deployment of software has resulted in identical copies.

IBM z/OS Change Tracker intends to offer the following capabilities:

•Real-time, system-wide software configuration change tracking and control for system libraries, across all LPARs in a sysplex

•Automatic versioning of identified system control data sets, including customization of the number of backups

•Member-level recovery  and reporting of real-time changes

•Immediate rollback capabilities to undo unplanned/unsuccessful promotions

•Quick comparisons between snapshots of system control data sets, or even entire volumes, with differences identified.

Resources:

Read the detailed Announcement

z/OS Change Tracker Content Solution page