INITSTATS processing

INITSTATS records statistics on all user profiles in the system. INITSTATS also allows your installation to take advantage of the SETROPTS INACTIVE option and the REVOKE, HISTORY, and WARNING options of SETROPTS PASSWORD. Only users with SPECIAL authority can control the recording of INITSTATS.

INITSTATS records the following:

The date and time RACF® processes a RACROUTE REQUEST=VERIFY (for example, logon or batch job initiation) for a particular user.
The number of RACROUTE REQUEST=VERIFYs for a user to a particular group.
The date and time of the last RACROUTE REQUEST=VERIFY for a user to a particular group.
These statistics are recorded on both the primary and backup databases the first time each day that the user uses the system, each time the user changes their password or password phrase, and each time the user enters the correct password or password phrase after having previously entered an incorrect one. If SETROPTS NOINACTIVE is in effect, the update for the first logon of the day is not recorded in the backup database.

At all other times these statistics are recorded only to the primary database. When resident data blocks are used, some resource statistics might not be updated when there is high volume processing and the same profiles are updated by multiple operations. This is more common when the RACF database is shared.

Guideline: Although INITSTATS affects performance because of I/O to the database, keep INITSTATS on. You can then use the SETROPTS operands INACTIVE and PASSWORD. For more information, see z/OS Security Server RACF Security Administrator's Guide.

When RACF is enabled for sysplex communication, the performance of recording the statistics to the backup database should improve because RACF has in-storage buffers for the backup database.

Installations with many RACF users who log on to various applications many times throughout the day, may choose to limit the impact of INITSTATS statistics recording for certain applications. These installations can specify that statistics for certain applications should be recorded for each user only once a day. If daily user statistics are set for a particular application, then, when the application issues a RACROUTE REQUEST=VERIFY, statistics are recorded only if no recording has been performed for the particular user that day. This can lessen the impact of serialization on the RACF database. To specify daily user statistics for an application, that application must specify the APPL operand on the RACROUTE REQUEST=VERIFY macro. When an application specifies the APPL operand, the system administrator can use a profile in the APPL class to control which users can access the application, and can limit INITSTATS processing to collect daily statistics only. To limit INITSTATS processing to collect daily statistics only, the system administrator specifies the string 'RACF-INITSTATS(DAILY)' in the APPLDATA field of the APPL class profile. For more information, refer to z/OS Security Server RACF Security Administrator's Guide,.