Take advantage of built-in sorting, filtering, graphing, and reporting tools

Robot/SPACE can help you with your day-to-day disk space management tasks. Let’s take a look at some of its features.

Compare collections to find growing objects
Use Collection Compare to compare the size of libraries or objects from one date to another. On the Collection Explorer panel, select the first comparison date, then right-click on the second date to compare the two. A pop-up window allows you to select compare libraries or objects between the two collection dates. You can display the data on your screen (interactively) or print the report. If you display the report, you easily can see which objects have grown. To sort the list by Size Change, click on that column heading. This displays the libraries or objects with the largest growth change listed first. You also can get this information in the Collection Reports section.

Filter collection history to find selected objects
When you view collection history by library or object, a filter option displays at the top of the screen. Use this option to limit the records shown by library, object, type, attribute, size, growth (compared to the previous collection), location, department, application, accounting code, owner, ASP, or ASP device. Filters make it easy to view a specific portion of the library and object data collected.

Transfer data to Excel
If you want to create your own graphs, or other Excel spreadsheet views, you can copy and paste the collection history into Excel. While viewing history by library or object, right-click Select All, right-click again, and select Copy to Clipboard. Open a blank Excel spreadsheet and press CTRL + V to paste your Robot/SPACE data into Excel.

Review graphs and trends
If you prefer to look at Robot/SPACE data in a graphical form, there are several graphing options in the Graphs/Trends section of Robot/SPACE, and in Robot/QUERY. On most graphs, you can view the exact date, time, and value of each point simply by putting your mouse over the point. In addition to looking at past data, you also can create trend graphs.

Review Robot/SPACE reports

Robot/SPACE produces several reports to help you manage your disk space.

• The Good Morning Report summarizes the top objects on your system. It lists the total size of the largest libraries, objects, directories, and IFS files. You can even print collection events.
• The System Health Report gives you statistics for all libraries on your system. You can filter the report by size or by growth rate. This report allows you to include only objects that have grown faster than the percentage rate you specify. You also can look at output queues or spooled files larger than the size you specify.
• Other reports you can print include Collection Events, Monitored ASP Information, Monitored Job Information, and Storage Audit Information.

Purge history files regularly
Robot/SPACE history files can grow very large over time if not purged. You should purge Collection History, Threshold History, and Storage Audit History regularly—even daily. You can submit these jobs manually or schedule them in Robot/SCHEDULE (recommended). In the Robot/SPACE Explorer, click Setup and then double-click History Purge.

• Collection History. Robot/SPACE purges its Collection History records based on whether you have specified long-term or short-term statistics to be retained. Each Collection Group has long- and short-term statistics retention periods defined. To see this information for a group, right-click on the group and select Properties. Each time you submit a collection, you have the option to specify how long to keep the history from that run. When you prompt the SPCCOLLECT command, you tell Robot/SPACE whether or not to “Perform Long-Term Process.” The default value is No.
• Threshold History. This history contains records created by Collection Group processing, ASP Monitors, and Job Temporary Storage Monitors. When you purge Threshold History, Robot/SPACE deletes all threshold history older than the specified number of days.
• Storage Audit History. Run this purge to delete audit history records created by storage audits.

Contributed by Jenny Dischinger, Technical Consultant

There’s an easy way to monitor Windows services from the System i

How long has the Windows print server been locked up? Why can’t we coordinate our System i backups with shutting down Windows services? Why didn’t we know the e-mail server was down?

If your System i operations team is saddled with the additional chore of monitoring Windows servers and batch processes, they’re not alone. It’s difficult enough to coordinate processes across a network of i5/OS systems, without adding multiple Windows servers. Unfortunately, most System i monitoring tools for Windows services don’t offer much help.

So, today you might have your network team monitoring these systems through freeware or through periodic manual checks. Do your operators wander through the server racks checking for unavailable services? Or, has your development team generously offered to write some code to help manage these issues?

Automate Windows service monitoring
Help/Systems has the simple solution: Robot/CLIENT. Robot/CLIENT can monitor Windows services with a command from the System i. The Monitor NT Service (RCLMONSVC) command (see Figure 1) can check for unavailable services, at regular intervals, from your most reliable server, the System i. When Robot/CLIENT detects a failed service, you can start a scheduled job, use the RCLSTRSVC command to restart it, react with another batch process, or send an e-mail to an operator.

Robot/CLIENT also has commands that let you start and end Windows services. These commands can release Windows services that have locked an i5/OS file, preventing a successful backup. All you need to do is start your backups with the command that ends Windows services (see Figure 2). When the backup completes, just restart the service using the start services command. Backups are just one example of when you might want to end a Windows service.

Let Robot/CLIENT go to work for you
As many of our customers have learned, Robot/CLIENT provides the tools necessary to maintain control of your network monitoring. It monitors and manages Windows services automatically, so you don’t have to worry about them. Let us help you automate Windows integration with the System i. Call for your Robot/CLIENT 30-day free trial. You won’t be disappointed.

Contributed by Tom Huntington, Vice President of Technical Services

With faster data encryption and concurrent Domino backups

Robot/SAVE 11.06 includes two major enhancements that speed data encryption and allow you to perform concurrent Domino backups.

Faster data encryption
After gaining some experience with our customers’ real-world data, we found a way to encrypt data much faster. Customers who use the highest levels of encryption and have large files will see the biggest performance improvements. If you haven’t tried Robot/SAVE 11 yet, now is great time to give it a whirl.

Robot/SAVE encryption is very flexible, allowing you to specify the level of data encryption to use and the data to be encrypted. You can choose to encrypt entire libraries, individual objects within a library, or object lists.

When you choose to use encryption on a whole library or objects within a library, Robot/SAVE backs up the library to a save file (for speed) and then encrypts the appropriate data as the data is saved to tape. When you implement encryption, you may see Robot/SAVE using more disk space than it did in the past. If you don’t have enough disk space to support this setup and you have a stable, repeating list of objects to be encrypted, you can create an object list for your encrypted objects and omit those objects from the library backup. This will improve speed and decrease disk space demands.

Concurrent Domino backups
Robot/SAVE now allows multiple Domino servers to be backed up concurrently. Concurrent backups might be the solution if you have been unable to back up all your servers within your allocated backup window.

Robot/SAVE allows only one backup set from each backup class to run at at time. Therefore, to set up this feature, you must create a separate Robot/SAVE class and set for each Domino server you want to back up concurrently. Each set that will be running a concurrent backup should use a different tape drive to avoid hardware conflicts. You then can schedule the backups to run at the same time.

Southwestern Motor Transport, or SMT, provides the eastern half of the United States with transportation services. In addition to offering direct service to fourteen states, the company provides service to Mexico, Canada, and the rest of the United States through their network of partner carriers. That translates to a lot of information that needs to be evaluated and analyzed, quickly and effectively.

Summarize information with SEQUEL
Robert Bernel, Data Processing Manager at SMT explains the major role that SEQUEL from Help/Systems plays. “We’ve been using SEQUEL for about six months now, primarily with our Ayers Rock application software database. One of the main reasons we decided to go with SEQUEL was because we were looking for a fast way to summarize information in different categories. Our users need a lot of flexibility and speed to collect and reformat data for analysis.”

SMT relies on SEQUEL to let users explore database information in unique ways. As Robert explains, “SEQUEL’s dynamic drill-down and regrouping capabilities are amazing. All our users need to get started is a SEQUEL view. There’s no need to set up pre-defined drill paths or definitions, or to go through the lengthy process of setting up a datamart or data cube to start analyzing key metrics. And, we can use SEQUEL directly with IBM System i transaction databases, even ones containing millions of records.”

From 20+ queries to one SEQUEL view
Continues Robert, “There’s no setup or data preparation required to get started. The first time I ran SEQUEL, I was amazed at what I could accomplish with a single SEQUEL view. Tasks that used to take 20 or more queries and a group of output files, now require a single SEQUEL view and are completed in seconds. We used to use two other data access products. They both required multiple passes through the data to extract the same information.”

For Robert, the most amazing thing about SEQUEL was the lack of prerequisite tasks. “No extracting files and no offloading data to another server. We work directly with the transaction database file. We can drill into or summarize any data fields. And, the performance has been great. We keep five years of history, millions of records, and SEQUEL is amazingly fast—its speed just blew us away.”

Executive dashboards present key metrics
SMT also relies on SEQUEL Executive Dashboards to deliver information to their end users. Executive dashboards present key business metrics and other functions in a consolidated graphical display that can be started with a click of an icon, or displayed at the start of a desktop session.

Robert is excited about dashboards and their potential. “We’ve already created a large number of SEQUEL executive dashboards. Dashboards are easy to deploy and even non-technical users can design their own. They are very easy to set up and I can put several dynamic views on one dashboard. Our users pick the one they want to work with. They can start out at the company level and then see how the data breaks down by dimension and category: zip code, state, division, region, terminal, customer, time period, and so forth. They can see the data any way they want for costing, profitability, ranking, and summarization. Nothing is pre-defined—SEQUEL handles all of that for us.”

Trend spotting
Robert explains how easy trending is with SEQUEL. “SEQUEL presents the information and we can dig deeper to spot trends. We use specific key performance indicators every day and we also love to do trend analyses with SEQUEL charts. The charts, like everything else in SEQUEL, are easy to set up. They can go right on the dashboards, or our users can create them dynamically.”

Robert sums up the power and appeal of SEQUEL. “When I first saw SEQUEL, I knew we needed it right away and our use has just taken off. We are very excited about what SEQUEL has given us. We started using SEQUEL straight out of the box, we were up and running quickly, and we didn’t have any training. The time savings have been tremendous and SEQUEL has opened a whole new window for us.”

We are interested in backing up report set definitions. If our primary server fails, we can reinstall Robot/REPORTS and restore the files we need to get started. What files in what libraries should we back up to restore in case of a disaster?
For disaster recovery purposes, back up the RBTREPLIB library. This library holds all of the setup information for Robot/REPORTS. If you are using disk for short-term archiving, you also should back up the REPSHTRMLB library. This library contains the short-term data. In a disaster recovery situation, you want to have this library so you can restore the reports that had gone to the short-term archive.

I want to move Robot/ALERT from one System i to another. Is there a way to save/export the current Robot/ALERT configuration, pager information, broadcast lists, and so on to the new system?
Yes, this is easy to do. End Robot/ALERT on the old system and save the RBTALRLIB library. Then, restore RBTALRLIB to the new system. You must delete and re-create the communication jobs on the new system.

In Robot/CONSOLE, what is the difference between running the command RBCCLNUP and running the history-purge program RBC596?
The RBC596 program cleans up Robot/CONSOLE history based on the age of a message and its severity level. It removes messages from monitored message queues.

The RBCCLNUP command cleans up dangling data queues left by users who do not run the RBCENDQ command.

How can I make sure Robot/SAVE regularly releases tapes to my scratch pool?
To release tapes to the scratch pool regularly, schedule the following command in Robot/SCHEDULE:
RBSPGMLIB/RBSRLSEXTP

How can I check to see if one or all my clients are running and ready to receive tasks from the System i?
You can poll each registered client using the Robot/CLIENT RCLPOLL command. The command determines if the Robot/CLIENT task processor is running and if the client is ready to receive tasks. The RCLPOLL command allows you to check the status of all attached clients at once or to enter up to 50 names of individual clients.

You can view the operational status of the clients on the Client Control Center panel.

To use the command interactively, enter it on a command line and press function key 4 to display the command prompt panel.

You also can schedule the command in Robot/SCHEDULE to poll each client on a regular schedule (such as hourly) or you can embed the command in a program.

How do I purge completed tasks in Robot/CLIENT?
The RCLCLEANUP command deletes completed tasks. You must specify the number of days of completed tasks you want to keep. The best way to keep completed tasks cleaned up is to set up a Robot/SCHEDULE job to run the RCLCLEANUP command to purge completed tasks on a regular basis.