Installation and Configuration Best Practices › Integration › CA Service Desk Integration

CA Service Desk Integration

Use the CA SMF Director integration with CA Service Desk to automatically open a service desk request if specified errors occur.

Business Value:

CA SMF Director manages and protects a large volume of important corporate data. If a corporation performs accounting and chargeback for data center resources the SMF data is where the majority of usage information is obtained to calculate charges. Using the automatic CA Service Desk notification for any CA SMF Director problems encountered during the dump process insures that there is a persistent record of the dump failure.

More information:

For more information about the CA Service Desk interface, see the Systems Programmer Guide.

CA MICS Resource Management Integration

CA SMF Director integrates with CA MICS Resource Management by means of split files and split index files. CA MICS uses the split files to periodically dump SMF log files.

Business Value

Minimizes the processor I/O and CPU time required to prepare SMF data for CA MICS. CA SMF Director provides the data splitting feature and has the additional benefit of interfacing directly with the CA MICS components that process SMF data. CA SMF Director keeps track of which split files have already been processed by CA MICS and which are ready to process.

Additional Considerations

CA SMF Director can be tailored to create split files based on the input needs of each CA MICS component within each unit. This allows automatic input of split files created by CA SMF Director into CA MICS without any user intervention. As split files are created, they are recorded into the split index. Once CA SMF Director marks them as being complete, they are automatically eligible for input into any subsequent CA MICS update process. This level of automation has the following benefits:

• Avoids contention between dump processing and CA MICS update processing because the CA SMF Director dump can be creating or adding data to a split file at the same time as CA MICS is reading completed split files. Additionally, dynamic allocation of the split file itself, using the absolute data set name, further reduces contention issues.
• Eliminates contention between CA MICS component update steps because each component has its own index and split files for processing.
• Eliminates the redundant processing of data that typically occurs after SMF dump time if separate input files need to be created.
• Prevents each CA MICS component step from reading unnecessary data because CA SMF Director can be used to restrict the split file contents to only those record types and subtypes required by each CA MICS component.
• Automatically selects the latest input files at those sites using incremental update to update the CA MICS database multiple times throughout the day, thus reducing overall nightly processing.

More Information

See “Integration with CA SMF Director” in the CA MICS Planning, Installation, Operation, and Maintenance Guide (PIOM).