1. OVERVIEW › 1.1 Primary Areas of Application

1.1 Primary Areas of Application

The CA MICS DB2 Analyzer helps you manage DB2 in the
following areas:

o  Capacity Planning - The DB2 Analyzer maintains a database
   of historical DB2 usage and performance data that enables
   you to develop system capacity projections based on actual
   workload and service data.  Service and workload
   information are two of the three primary factors in a
   capacity planning effort.  Data from the CA MICS DB2
   Analyzer, used in conjunction with the third primary
   input, your own forecasts of changes and the growth of
   database use and services, provides a foundation for
   effective database capacity planning.

o  Performance Management - The DB2 Analyzer allows you to
   examine and analyze specific DB2 workloads to identify
   system and user problems.  Subsequent problem correction,
   as well as the ability to monitor user and DB2 plan
   resource consumption, can result in significant
   improvement in system performance.

o  Service Levels - The DB2 Analyzer allows you to analyze
   and report the level of service provided by your site's
   database management facilities.   This information can be
   significant in establishing and maintaining realistic
   service level goals and agreements.  The DB2 Analyzer can
   combine transactions into site-specific groupings (for
   example, accounts payable) to provide consolidated
   reporting on SLA achievement.  Data from the DB2 Analyzer
   can be valuable for assessing service degradation
   resulting from insufficient system capacity and accounting
   for the corresponding effect on end-user productivity.

o  Management and Analytical Reporting - You can group and
   summarize information directly from the database to create
   useful management and analytical reporting measures.
   Concise, one-page summaries are also available that
   display key DB2 system trends as well as statistics
   describing CPU utilization, storage management, log
   management, and database activity.   In addition to these
   standard reports, you can easily create custom reports and
   resummarize data when the summarized data in the database
   does not your address specific reporting needs.

o  Standards Enforcement and Security - The DB2 Analyzer
   enables you to identify interactive plans that require
   extremely long execution times and to report which DB2
   plans are being utilized by specific users.  You can use
   this information to establish and enforce essential
   security and standards programs within the DB2
   environment.

o  Audit Reporting - The DB2 Analyzer allows you to monitor
   activity within DB2 indicating the type of activity being
   attempted and the authorization of the DB2 user requesting
   the action.

o  Availability and Reliability - The DB2 Analyzer helps you
   report on availability by monitoring DB2 downtime.  At a
   more detailed level, you can use plan termination
   information to measure database system reliability.

o  Accounting and Chargeback - The Analyzer's user and plan
   activity files contain data that you can use for billing
   DB2 system resource use.  The data includes CPU time, I/O
   counts, and DB2 statement counts by type (for example,
   create table, insert, and update).  A standard interface
   to CA MICS Accounting and Chargeback permits accounting
   from SMF measures of DB2 activity.  In addition, you can
   allocate the costs of database hardware, software, and
   personnel directly to users based on the resources
   consumed, which can be important both as a part of
   day-to-day information services billing and as an aid in
   assessing the fiscal impact and economic feasibility of
   new or existing applications.