iSeries message management (System i, Power systems, AS/400) can be more than a full-time job if you have to do it manually. Messages need a response, resources must be monitored, FTP requests checked, and disk space tracked—often over multiple systems and across platforms. How can you be sure you don’t miss an important system event?
When you're responsible for managing the System i, you probably find yourself dealing with some—or all—of the following issues:
- You have to come in on a Saturday every month to make sure the month-end processes ran correctly.
- You have iSeries messages that need to be managed. They sit waiting for answers, delaying your processing.
- Critical messages from weekend processing often go unnoticed until Monday morning.
- You need a night operator just to monitor messages.
- You have to walk around the data center several times a day and check critical resources to make sure they're running.
- Your run book is filled with checks that the operator must perform manually (for example, a specific subsystem is available or a critical job is running).
- Your operators have to keep an eye on several workstations to monitor the health of the system.
- You see an iSeries message that was mismanaged (responded to incorrectly), but don't know who responded.
- You still provide manual reports that track disk space usage.
- Your IFS is growing but you don't know why.
- You had a major business outage because the operations team missed a system error.
Help/Systems can help you solve these management problems and much more. The Robot products are designed to manage iSeries systems, whether you have one or many.
Our message management and disk space management software products help you:
- Manage QSYSOPR messages (Robot/CONSOLE)
- Monitor system resources such as subsystems and job queues (Robot/CONSOLE)
- Track disk space usage for libraries, files, members, temporary storage, spooled files, and the IFS (Robot/SPACE)
And, you can manage it all from a single, consolidated, graphical console, for one system or for many, by using Robot/NETWORK to tie it all together.
When you're out of the data center, you can forward critical messages to your cell phone and reply directly without needing to sign on to the system. With the Robot message management software products and iSeries monitoring software, the system monitors itself and alerts you (via Robot/ALERT) only when it needs human assistance.
In addition, you can make the Robot products your data center management focal point, or forward events to an enterprise monitoring tool via SNMP.