Introduction

Introduction

The guide introduces the CA Technologies mainframe management strategy and features, and describes the best practices for installing and configuring your product.

The intended audience of this guide is systems programmers and administrators who install, maintain, deploy, and configure your product.

This section contains the following topics:

Active and Heartbeat Event Management through CA OPS/MVS EMA

CA Technologies mainframe products can automatically communicate both active status events and heartbeat events to CA OPS/MVS in a consistent manner. The enabling technology for this feature is through a generic event API call that CA OPS/MVS provides to the other products so that they can communicate events to CA OPS/MVS.

Two versions of this API call are provided to support this initiative:

• An active status event API call that allows other products to generate events for the CA OPS/MVS EMA System State Manager (SSM) component when they are starting, up, stopping, or down.
• A heartbeat API call that allows other CA Technologies products to communicate a normal, warning, or problem overall health status and reasoning to CA OPS/MVS EMA on a regular interval.

After a CA Technologies product begins generating heart beat events for CA OPS/MVS, CA OPS/MVS can also react to the lack of a heart beat event from another CA Technologies product address space, treating this as an indication that there is either a potential problem with the CA Technologies product address space, or there is a larger system-level problem.

SSM is a built-in feature of CA OPS/MVS that uses an internal relational data framework to proactively monitor and manage started tasks, online applications, subsystems, JES initiators, and other z/OS resources including your CA Technologies mainframe products. SSM compares the current state of online systems, hardware devices, and the other resources with their desired state, and then automatically makes the necessary corrections when a resource is not in its desired state. This provides proactive and reactive state management of critical resources. As previously noted, SSM is particularly interested in receiving active status events consistently from all CA Technologies products when they are starting, up, stopping, or down. Without this consistent type of events, SSM must maintain separate rules in CA OPS/MVS for each product unique messages that are associated with starting and stopping.