Getting rid of operations checklists

Do the system operators in your data center have checklists that look like this?

Do they go through these lists every hour? On every system? At change of shift? Or at specific times of the day or night?

Robot/CONSOLE can automate these checklists for you. Robot/CONSOLE’s resource monitors run on your system and check the status of those resources at whatever interval you require. You can also create a command job in Robot/SCHEDULE to check the status of a resource at a specific time of the day or night with the RBCCHKRSC command.

Because system operators are busy with other duties, they may not be able to check system resources as often as they would like. Robot/CONSOLE can check resources as frequently as every five minutes and let you know if there is a problem. If your critical system resources are running as they should, Robot/CONSOLE just logs the fact that they were checked and moves on to the next task. If there is a problem with a resource, a message is sent to the RBCRSCQ message center containing the details of the problem.

You can create a message set making the message response-required, and the message will follow the same escalation process as other critical messages going to QSYSOPR. The operations staff follows the same procedures for all types of messages, reducing training needs.

You can choose among several Message Center options to be notified of problems:

• On the User Notification tab, add your user profile to the RBCRSCQ Message Center as the User to Notify when a new message arrives.
• If you have Robot/ALERT, our messaging software, add the operations device as the device to page on the Device Notification tab.
• Redirect messages needing a reply to the Message Center your system operators are watching on the Message Direction tab.

To make the messages that are issued when a resource is not in the expected state escalate through the notification process, do the following:

1. Build a table of the messages in file RBTCONLIB/RBCRSCF that you want to escalate. Here is an example:
   
2. Create a message set that makes the messages in the table response-required using the Unconditional Instructions tab:
   
3. If Robot/CONSOLE finds the system resource or object that you are monitoring in an unexpected status, you will be notified immediately with a message such as the following:
   

This means your system operators can spend more time managing your systems instead of monitoring them. Robot/CONSOLE’s resource monitoring does the monitoring for you, enabling you to attend to only situations that are out of the ordinary.

Contributed by Pat Cameron, Technical Training Consultant