April 2011

Six tips for working with Robot/CONSOLE

Take advantage of Robot/CONSOLE and improve your message management

Robot/CONSOLE has a lot of great features you can use to manage IBM i messages automatically. Whether you’re a relatively new user, or more experienced, here are six tips to help you get the most out of Robot/CONSOLE.

TIP 1: Suppress messages

You can use Robot/CONSOLE to prevent frequent, unimportant, informational messages from displaying in your message centers and/or message history. Robot/CONSOLE offers two ways to suppress informational messages:

• Select the Suppress Informational Messages on Message Centers option on the Unconditional Instructions tab in a message set. If you suppress a message using this option, the message does not display on the message center and is not recorded in the Robot/CONSOLE history records.
• Use the OPerator Assistance Language (OPAL) SUPPRESS operation in a message set. If you use OPAL to suppress a message, the message does not display on the message center, but Robot/CONSOLE creates a history record.

TIP 2: Make messages response-required

You can use Robot/CONSOLE to make important Informational messages act as though they are Inquiry-type messages. They escalate according to your default message center escalation path for messages needing a reply. There are two ways to make messages Response-Required:

• Select the Require a Response for Informational Messages option on the Unconditional Instructions tab in a message set.
• Use the RESPOND operation on the OPAL tab in a message set.

TIP 3: Escalate messages

The Robot/CONSOLE message escalation process ensures that operators are notified of critical events. You can use its notification options for immediate notification of critical events, and to escalate important messages to the right person!

To set up any of the following escalation options for a message center from the Robot/CONSOLE Explorer, right-click a message center and select Properties to display the Message Center Properties window.

• Pop-up message notification

  Set this up using the “Notify users when a new message arrives” option on the User Notification tab.

• Robot/ALERT messaging

  You can send a message to a user or list of users via e-mail, text message to a cell phone, SMS text message, or SNMP trap message to your enterprise monitor server. You also specify these options on the Device Notification tab.

• Escalate messages to your Robot/NETWORK Status Center

  Set this up using the Message Redirection tab.

TIP 4: Monitor jobs using resource monitoring

Robot/CONSOLE can monitor jobs for a desired status and take actions based on that status. If a job is not its expected status, it triggers an event that creates a message in the RBCRSCQ message queue.

To set up job resource monitoring, select Monitored Objects from the Robot/CONSOLE Explorer. Select Resource Monitors, then select Types. Right-click Job Name Resources and select Add to create a job monitor.

On the Resource Monitor Properties window, fill in the job name and select the expected status for that job from the drop-down menu. For example, if you have an important job that always needs to be active, the expected status is ACTIVE. If Robot/CONSOLE checks the job and finds that it’s not ACTIVE, it sends a message to the RBCRSCQ queue for further processing by a message set.

Example:

Robot/CONSOLE generates the following message when the job’s status is not ACTIVE:

JOB0001: JOB XYZ IS NOT IN THE EXPECTED STATUS. ACTUAL STATUS INACTIVE

Figure 1: Robot/ CONSOLE Explorer Resource Monitor Properties Window

Checking Status

You can check the status of a resource three ways:

• Specify the resource’s Priority on the Resource Monitor Properties window (see Figure 1). You can change the priority settings. By default, a Priority 1 resource is checked every 5 minutes; Priority 4 resources are checked hourly.
• Schedule the RBTCONLIB/RBCCHKRSC command to run at specific times of the day.
• Manually check the resource from the Robot/CONSOLE Explorer. Select Resource Monitors in the Tree view to display your resource monitors in the List view. You can select All Resource Monitors to see all resources at once in the List view of the display (see Figure 2). You can right-click any resource to display a menu of options you can use to work with the resource.

Figure 2: Robot/CONSOLE Explorer Resource Monitor Status List View Display

TIP 5: Delete Robot/CONSOLE history to control the size of history files

Robot/CONSOLE history files can become quite large over time. To keep this under control, create and schedule a Robot/SCHEDULE command job containing the command RBTCONLIB/RBCDLTHST to purge excess history.

Example:

The following command deletes all history more than seven days old.

RBTCONLIB/RBCDLTHST NBROFDAYS(7) RMVRPY(*YES) MAXSEV(99)

TIP 6: Report on messages processed by Robot/CONSOLE

To create a report that shows you all the messages that occurred on your system more than 10 times in the past week (see Figure 3), run the Most Common Messages Report (job RBC411) with some special Reserved Command Variables (you must have Robot/ SCHEDULE installed on your system).

Figure 3: Most Common Messages Report With Special Reserved Command Variables

First, create the following Reserved Command Variables in Robot/SCHEDULE (see the Robot/ SCHEDULE User Guide for more information).

@@TDM7

Today’s date less 7 days, in MMDDYY format

@@TDMM

Today’s date, in MMDDYY format

@@TDY7

Today’s date less 7 days, in YYMMDD format

@@TDYY

Today’s date, in YYMMDD format

Then, use the following command for the job:

CALL RBC411 PARM(‘@@TDM7@@TDMM@@TDY7 @@TDYY000010N’)

Note: This report also indicates whether a message set exists for each message listed.

Contributed by Jenny Freehauf, Technical Consultant

Q & A

How can I determine whether my Robot products are V6R1-compliant?

Just use the link http://www.helpsystems.com/support/currently-shipping-releases to see the most current software levels from the Help/Systems Web site.

Is there a way to get a printout of my current Robot/SCHEDULE security setup?

Yes, enter the following commands from a command line:

ADDLIBLE ROBOTLIB

CALL RBT400