Administration

Administration is what you have to do after installing RMF™ and before you start using it for measuring resources. The administrator creates the prerequisites that the daily user takes for granted, like setting up job control procedures and defining standard data sets for the installation.

Unlike installation, administration is typically an on-going task, though not as frequent as resource measurement. Start with administrative effort after installation, and continue as the needs of the users change with changing conditions in the system.

An RMF administrator can:

Define system parameters and access definitions being required for smoothly running gathering functions.
Update the RMF cataloged procedure to define the gatherer options, and to set default values for the SMF wrap-around data buffer, in which RMF monitors store the data they collect.
Preallocate reporter data sets for Monitor I and Monitor II output, to be used instead of the default SYSOUT.
Tailor the options for the Distributed Data Server.
Synchronize SMF recording intervals with data collection intervals of the RMF monitors, to obtain comparable measurements.
Define VSAM data sets for storing data from Monitor III gatherer sessions.
Define the parmlib members for the RMF monitors. These determine the default options for the respective monitors, so their contents should be agreed upon between administrator and performance analyst. A parmlib member for each monitor is provided with RMF, but can be modified as required. The options that can be included in the members are described in detail in Data Gathering Reference and Reporting Reference.

Most of these tasks have to be performed only once during the initial customization of RMF according to the requirements of your installation. An ongoing task is the migration from one release to the next one. Therefore, these migration steps are described separately to highlight the differences between releases and the actions which might be required to ensure that you exploit the new functions that RMF is offering with each new release.

In addition, this chapter points to installation steps that have to be performed individually by everybody who wants to exploit the workstation-based functions that are available with RMF.