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

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 at 9:59 am and is filed under Robot/SPACE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.