Configuration Best Practices › Use XCF for SMF Record Notification

Use XCF for SMF Record Notification

Change your initialization so that CA7ONL and ICOM join an XCF group.

CA WA CA 7 Edition tracks the progress of jobs on the operating system using SMF for z/OS work and pseudo SMF for cross-platform work. Records are generated for the job start, step end, data set create, and job end. ICOM is the facility that picks up the feedback and communicates it to CA7ONL. Before r11.3, all ICOMs wrote SMF feedback to the communications data set.

The SMF initialization file statement has a keyword of SMFXCF= with the default of NO. As a best practice, specify YES and CA7ONL joins an XCF group. The group name defaults to the instance name or can be specified on the SMFXCF keyword.

For ICOM, the PARM, XCF, determines whether ICOM uses XCF to notify CA7ONL that the SMF records are ready to process. The default is XCF=NO. As a best practice, specify NOTIFY to indicate that ICOM joins an XCF group. To specify a group name other than the default, add the keyword XCFGRP=grpname.

If XCF=NOTIFY is used for ICOM, XCF is not used for the SMF feedback process, but XCF notifies CA WA CA 7 Edition when SMF data is written to the COMMDS. If the LPAR that runs this ICOM does not have much activity, this setting can make SMF feedback processing quicker.

You can run ICOMs using this feature simultaneously other ICOMs are running without this feature, communicating to the same CA WA CA 7 Edition.

Business Value:

This best practice ensures more efficient tracking of work in CA7ONL.