1. OVERVIEW › 1.6 Benefits
1.6 Benefits
The CA MICS Analyzer Option for VM/CMS contributes to the
overall benefits that CA MICS provides. Those benefits fall
into the following broad categories.
o Improves day-to-day I/S management
o Reduces risk to the enterprise
o Controls and/or helps reduce costs
o Improves return on the I/S investment
o Increases productivity
o Improves planning
Each of these benefits is described in detail below.
Improves Day-to-day I/S Management
o Allows managers to track usage and plan corrective actions
to ensure smooth operations
o Allows you to identify problems more quickly and
accurately, and to assess or quantify a problem's impact
in terms of the root cause(s) and resolution alternatives
o Allows you to measure and track the service levels that
are being delivered for VM and CMS workloads.
Reduces Risk to this Enterprise
o Allows I/S to define exceptional conditions and assess
their impact
o Provides auditing and control capabilities for VM and CMS
activity
o Allows you to archive and back-up system data
automatically so that you can retrieve historical
information easily for recovery and evaluation purposes
Controls and/or Helps Reduce Costs
o Ensures that individual users are charged only for the
resources they use
o Allows you to identify unused resources and substantially
reduce their associated costs
o Using the CA MICS Analyzer Option for VM/CMS in place of
other VM reporting products eliminates the costs and
problems associated with maintaining separate products.
Improves Return on the I/S Investment
o Allows managers to gauge the quality of service being
provided
o Provides a basis for chargeback of operating system and
hardware resource usage either through CA MICS Accounting
and Chargeback or a user-developed costing process
o Helps you to understand, report on, control, and reduce VM
and CMS expenses
Increases Productivity
o Allows less experienced users to interpret report results
and to use database information
o Provides the opportunity to learn about the
characteristics and uses of VM data via the comprehensive
data dictionary and report documentation
o Reduces the task of coordinating information from multiple
sources so that you can report or analyze information at
the enterprise rather than the system level
o Reduces the large quantities of VM data to a manageable
and easily used format.
Improves Planning
o Allows managers to anticipate problems before they affect
the system
o Provides the raw data and a common frame of reference for
other analyses such as capacity and hardware planning,
workload balancing, and performance management
o Allows you to use summarized historical data for trend
analysis
