CA ENF Best Practices › Installation Considerations

Installation Considerations

ENF runs on all IBM supported releases of z/OS.

ENF has the ability to record system and CA product generated events in ENF database event tables. There are two possible reasons to record events.

• Catch up on previous events. CA products that listen for ENF events may catch up on past events if the CA product was down while ENF was up and running. This process is called event checkpointing or event recovery. As CA products start up and initialize with ENF, they can request that events from a past date and time be posted to the CA product ENF listening task before new events are posted. CA products that take advantage of event checkpointing have installation steps to update ENF parameters so that specific events will be recorded.
• Capture specific events for analytical reporting purposes. You can interrogate the event database using SQL reports. Running such reports is discussed in more detail later in this guide.

ENF event recording requires the installation of CA Datacom/AD at a minimum level of Version 12.0. ENF requires that a CA Datacom MUF (Multi-User facility) be established to house the ENF database on each system that is running ENF. You can run the MUF either within the ENF address space or external to the ENF address space. We recommend you run the MUF internal to the ENF address space. This makes ENF run more self-contained and similar to the way ENF runs on releases prior to ENF r12.

The ENF event data is unique to each system, therefore sharing a CA Datacom/AD MUF with other CA products is not practical because other CA products generally share data across systems using a cross system MUF. Sharing a MUF may also not be practical because of maintenance and backup considerations. Do not attempt to share the MUF with other CA products unless the product documentation specifically states otherwise. The ENF MUF can be shared with the Event Management common service and it is expected that ENF and Event Management will share the same MUF if you are using Event Management message actions or calendars.

Started Task Procs ENFIMUF, which uses an internal MUF, and ENFXMUF, which uses an external MUF, are delivered in the CA Common Services for z/OS CAIPROC data set to serve as a basis for customization.

If no event recording is needed or desired, then the CAIPROC data set delivered member ‘ENF’ can be customized to run with no database.