1. OVERVIEW › 1.6 Benefits
1.6 Benefits
The Batch and Operations Analyzer 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
The material below explains how the Batch and Operations
Analyzer contributes to these benefits.
Improves Day-to-Day I/S Management
o Allows managers to track batch and system usage and plan
corrective actions that ensure smooth operations
o Allows you to identify problems quickly and accurately
and to assess the impact of each in terms of the root
cause and what can be done to resolve it
o Allows you to measure and track the service levels being
delivered for batch workloads
Reduces Risk to the Enterprise
o Allows I/S to define exceptional conditions and assess
their impact
o Contributes to preventive maintenance activities
o Supports SMF interval recording, which reduces the amount
of measurement data lost due to system outages
o Provides auditing and control capabilities for batch, TSO,
system task, and spooling activity
Controls and/or Helps Reduce Costs
o Provides an equitable means of charging users for
resources used
o Helps identify unused resources to help reduce costs
o Can replace other SMF reporting products, thus eliminating
the costs associated with maintaining separate products
Improves Return on the I/S Investment
o Allows managers to gauge the quality of service that is
being provided
o Provides a basis for chargeback of operating system and
hardware resource usage, either through CA MICS Accounting
and Chargeback or through a user-developed costing process
o Improves your ability to understand, report on, and reduce
batch, APPC/MVS TPs, spooling operations, and to a lesser
degree, TSO expenses
Increases Productivity
o Makes it easier for less knowledgeable users to interpret
the results of reports and use information in the data
base
o Provides the opportunity to learn about the charac-
teristics and uses of SMF data via the comprehensive Data
Dictionary and reports documentation
o Reduces the task of coordinating information from multiple
sources so that you can report or analyze information at
both the enterprise and system levels
o Reduces the large quantities of SMF data to a manageable
and easily used format
Improves Planning
o Allows managers to anticipate problems before the system
is affected
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 trend analysis through the use of summarized
historical data
