1.6 Benefits

The IMS Analyzer contributes to the overall benefits that the
CA MICS IS Management Support System provides. Those benefits
fall into the following broad categories:

o  Improves day-to-day IS management

o  Reduces risk to the enterprise

o  Controls and/or helps reduce costs

o  Improves return on the IS investment

o  Increases productivity

o  Improves planning

The material below explains how the IMS Analyzer contributes
to these benefits.


Improves Day-to-Day IS Management

o  Helps you track IMS usage to plan corrective actions to
   ensure smooth operations

o  Helps you to identify problems faster and more accurately,
   and to assess or quantify their impact in terms of root
   cause(s) and alternative solutions

o  Allows you to measure and track service levels being
   delivered for batch workloads


Reduces Risk to the Enterprise

o  Allows you to define exceptional conditions and to assess
   their impact

o  Contributes to preventive maintenance activities

o  Provides auditing and control capabilities for IMS
   transaction activity


Controls and/or Helps Reduce Costs

o  Allows you to equitably charge users for the amount of
   resources they use

o  Helps you to analyze and maximize resource usage and to
   lower associated fixed costs

o  Replaces other IMS reporting products, eliminating the
   necessity for multiple products


Improves Return on the IS 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 a basic user-developed costing process

o  Improves your ability to understand, report on, control,
   and reduce IMS expenses


Increases Productivity

o  Allows less experienced users to interpret results of
   reports and use database information

o  Provides the opportunity to learn about the
   characteristics and uses of IMS 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
   the enterprise rather than the system level

o  Reduces the large quantities of IMS data to a manageable
   and easy to use 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