Introduction

Even though IBM Systems Management Facilities Data (SMF) is important, depending upon your business' use of chargeback analysis and reporting, resource accounting and billing, and/or capacity planning, it is cumbersome to manage. It places a heavy burden on the Computer Operator, who traditionally has had to copy SMF data to tape, record its location, and protect the volume from inadvertently being overwritten. This manual procedure is obviously error prone. If an installation has manual tape management procedures, errors are even more liable to occur, causing loss of valuable SMF records. Failure to dump and clear SMF SYSx.MANx files or SMF logstreams in a timely fashion can degrade overall system performance and in some situations halt the operating system.

CA SMF Director is a software product for the management of data sets containing SMF data in a z/OS environment. When properly used it can be a cost effective tool for tracking and maintaining SMF data at your installation.

The following features are provided with this product:

• Automatic Unloading of SYSx.MANx Files
• Automatic Copying of SMF Data from Logstreams
• Maintaining Inventory of SMF Records by Date, Time, and Volume Serial
• Optionally segregate SMF data into separate history archives with separate retention periods based on the SMF record type
• Protecting Data Sets Containing SMF Records
• Printing and Extracting SMF Records by Date and Time
• Optionally segregating SMF data by day onto a single tape volume
• Providing Automatic Duplexing and Multiplexing of SMF Records
• Providing SMF Record Verification
• Providing Automatic Magnetic Tape Management
• Integrating with Other Products
• Online Query Interface

These features are described in detail on the following pages.