I find that even some of our long-term IBM Control Center customers don’t know about some very easy things they could do with the solution that could drastically help their day-to-day work life. So, I thought I’d launch a “blog blitz” this week. Each day I’ll provide a different tip so that by the end of the week you’ll have five easy things you can start doing right away to make life easier. Here we go…

Tip 1) Avoid query overload and empower users with “Monitor this.” This is probably the most popular of the five tips I’m sharing. This feature is great for power users as well as business users or less technical users as well. “Monitor this” makes it easy to monitor crucial transfers and eliminates any complexity in setting up rules and alerts by just pointing and clicking on what you need.

Here’s how. Navigating from the top toolbar in IBM Control Center, go to Monitor and to Completed Processes. Select the file transfer you’re curious about. A “monitor this” button pops up and you select what activity you want to monitor, for example “missed start time” or “missed end time” [Figure 1]. Click on “yes” and you’re all set. You can also point and click to setup notifications and rules in this same window, and even go deeper and customize how you’d like to be alerted – email, text or both.  


Here’s a typical use case. Every Wednesday at the end of the day a file transfer comes in indicating a status dump was completed. You need to make sure you receive that status update, but rarely need to look at the data file. Instead of having to go in manually around that time every Wednesday and then keep checking back until the status dump arrives, you can setup an alert to be notified automatically every Wednesday when it is received.

Business users can also add their own set of notifications and start receiving them directly with admin confirmation. This self-service capability saves everyone a lot of time – business users get the information they need when they need it, and you can spend less time responding to queries and more time on higher level tasks.

I hope this tip helps get your week off to an even better start. Check out the blog tomorrow for Tip 2.