What you need to know about your disk space but were afraid to ask

Robot/SPACE helps you manage your disk space. This article covers some common questions users have and how Robot/SPACE helps you answer them.

Can I tell which job is using my temporary storage?
Robot/SPACE has a monitor job (SPCJTSMON) that monitors job temporary storage. You set the thresholds for both logging and notification. To view all jobs that have exceeded the thresholds, right-click on the Job Temporary Storage Monitor from the Robot/SPACE Explorer and select Threshold History. You can sort the data by Date/Time, Peak Temporary Storage Used, Job Name, and so on.

How do I tell which user profile is responsible for using the most disk space?
The easiest way to find out who is using the most disk space is to display a graph using the Graphs/Trends feature. Right-click on Graphs/Trends and select Display. Select a collection group for the data and choose how to summarize it. Choose Summarize Total Size By Owner to view a pie chart showing the profiles using the most disk space.

Tip: Float your cursor over any piece of the pie chart to display the total amound of disk space used by that profile.

How can I determine where the disk space has gone?
Use the Critical Storage Investigator (CSI). The CSI uses a logical progression to find the source of disk space problems.

1. Open the Critical Storage Investigator by selecting its icon in the toolbar menu. The CSI displays overall ASP utilization levels and any sudden growth.

2. View job temporary storage to see if an out-of-control job is consuming your temporary storage and causing a sudden increase in ASP usage.

3. Review collection statistics to see whether a library or IFS directory has grown more than expected.

4. Run a collection group for current object size statistics.

5. If you haven’t found the problem, run the System Health report. This report lists every system object that has grown by the amount you specify and allows you to pinpoint unusual object growth. It summarizes each library by listing the current size, previous size, previous date, percentage change, and size change.

Can I be notified if an iASP or ASP has grown too quickly?
Robot/SPACE has an ASP monitor job (SPCASPMON) that runs in the RBTSLEEPER subsystem and continually checks ASP and iASP growth. If any thresholds are reached, Robot/ALERT can notify you by sending a message to an e-mail address, cell phone, PDA, or other device. Robot/SPACE can also send a message to a message queue, or send a Robot/NETWORK status message. You can monitor up to three different ASP percent usage thresholds, a growth rate threshold (such as ASP usage grew 15% over the last hour), and unprotected storage use.

Do I have any large unused *SAVF objects?
Robot/SPACE has a storage audit task to delete unused save files. Right-click in the Storage Audit section to add a storage audit. Select the tasks button and select “Delete unused save files.”

Or, you can print the results of the storage audit instead of actually deleting the unused save files. To do this, make sure the “Corrective Action” check box is set to None and the check box to print results from this audit task is selected.

How can I easily copy library statistical data to Excel?
Right-click on a collection to view Collection History. Select the date for which want statistical data and click on the Libraries section. The right panel displays detailed library information. Right-click on the library data and choose Select All. Right-click again and select Copy to Clipboard. You can keep the labels, or not, and paste the results into a blank Excel spreadsheet!

Contributed by Jenny Dischinger, Technical Consultant

New Robot/SCHEDULE GUI provides drill-down access and more!

Have you had a recent business audit on the production control (job scheduling) area of your computer operations? Is your management team asking for reports detailing who changed what batch job for night processing? Did the auditor ask about who has access or authority to change the jobs in the schedule? Did the auditor ask for a report that lists all the jobs that ran last night?

Manual or semi-automated schedules
If you are running a manual schedule, it is very difficult to provide timely and accurate information. It is even harder if you have written your own utility to run your schedule! The auditor has no sympathy about how much work you will need to do manually to provide the answer to his or her questions.

There are many ways to submit jobs to batch on the System i platform. You can use the IBM SBMJOB command; you can use the built-in job scheduler (WRKJOBSCDE); and there many job schedule software packages for sale. The problem is that most of these options provide very little, if any, historical information about the changes to the schedule or the actual running of the jobs. The auditor still needs the information.

Automated schedules
If you have Robot/SCHEDULE, these questions are not hard to answer. And, if you have Version 10.02, it is even easier. The new graphical user interface makes it easy to cut and paste information into Excel. You can provide answers in minutes, if not seconds. The following Robot/SCHEDULE features typically are used by those who must comply with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) audits:

1. The Good Morning Report. Robot/SCHEDULE’s Good Morning Report summarizes your night batch processing. It shows the number of jobs that finished normally and the number that finished abnormally. It also provides a list of the jobs that did not complete normally.
2. Security. Robot/SCHEDULE has its own security system, above and beyond i5/OS object-based security. Its job security controls who has access to the job schedule and you can produce a report that lists access control.
3. Job Completion History. Every batch process that runs on your system is tracked in job completion history, including jobs submitted by end users and those submitted by Robot/SCHEDULE. The history provides information about start/end times and dates, as well the duration of the job.
4. Audit Logs. Robot/SCHEDULE maintains audit logs that track schedule changes and actions on the schedule. It even tracks when an operator forces a job to run immediately.
5. Product Master. The Product Master allows you to create jobs on one partition and send them to another. Many people use this as a change control mechanism for batch jobs. You can create a job on the development partition, test it, and then send it to the production partition. These activities are logged in Robot/SCHEDULE (10.02 or higher) and Robot/NETWORK 10.0.

Capture changes to production control schedule
So, how easy is it to get this information? Using Robot/SCHEDULE’s new graphical interface, open the Audit Log window, shown in Figure 1. Highlight the data you want to show the auditor. Right-click and copy this information to the clipboard. In seconds, you have captured the changes to your production control schedule!

Once the entries are on the clipboard, simply open Microsoft Excel, your e-mail client, or another program and paste your data, as shown in Figure 2. Most auditors seem to prefer receiving information in Excel format.

Capture job history
Robot/SCHEDULE Job Completion History is another handy list of data for auditors and managers. Most of the time, you don’t think about this data, but when you need it, it’s really great to have. The Job Completion History is revolving group of records about your batch processing. The Good Morning Report, job schedule forecasting, and other reports get information from the job history. You can easily copy this information to Excel, just as in the Audit Log example above.

Robot/SCHEDULE makes it easy
As many of you have learned, Robot/SCHEDULE helps you take the final step toward providing the information management and auditors need for your production control environment.

Contributed by Tom Huntington, Vice President of Technical Services

One of the powerful features of SEQUEL is its ability to extract data from the System i and create PC-compatible output files in a wide array of formats. You can save SEQUEL output files (to your PC or network drives) or e-mail them automatically (using the version of Help/Systems’ ESEND e-mail file and report distribution software that comes with SEQUEL.). This article focuses on saving results in Excel (XLS) format from a Web browser.

Let’s look at an example from the SEQUELEX library shipped with SEQUEL. The DDREGON view creates results that can be displayed in ViewPoint or the Web interface.

Remote users need Excel format
SEQUEL users often ask, “Can remote users running SEQUEL Web Interface save their results in Excel format?”

One way to accomplish this is to display the results in the browser with the SEQUEL Web Interface, then use the File > Save As option to save the HTML file to a local drive. When Excel opens the file, it converts HTML to its own format. The problem with this method is that you must review the file to remove unwanted headings, footers, and other formatting from the spreadsheet. In addition, you may need to address character/numeric data conversion issues.

SEQUEL scripting provides a better way
SEQUEL scripting lets you save multiple commands within a script object. Scripting gives you much of the capability of CL programming without requiring technical programming knowledge.

To continue with our example, let’s create a SEQUEL script that allows remote users to request results in native Excel format within a browser window. Enter the following commands in the SEQUEL script editor, replacing directory/file references with your own:

10 MONMSG

20 RMVLNK OBJLNK(’/tmp/ddxls*.xls’)

Where MONMSG is a standard i5/OS command that monitors system escape messages and RMVLINK removes previous output files created with this script. Continue with:

30 EXECUTE VIEW(SEQUELEX/DDREGON) PCFMT(*XLS) TOSTMF(’/tmp/ddxls&&jobnbr.xls’) REPLACE(*YES)

The SEQUEL EXECUTE command creates output files from the System i database. In this example, the DDREGON view extracts the data and saves the result in XLS format. The TOSTMF parameter puts the file in an IFS location.

Note: This script is designed to be flexible so that multiple users can run it at the same time. The flexibility comes from starting the file name with the ddxls prefix and indicating a variable value with double ampersands (&&). In this case, the variable is the system job number. Click on the Variables tab within the Script editor to define the variable.

Next, enter the following command:

40 SWIOPEN NEW(*YES) TITLE(’Customer Summary’) ROWSET((100)) COLSET((1 100 ‘http://servername/tmp/ddxls&&jobnbr.xls’))

The SEQUEL Web Interface command SWIOPEN opens a new browser window to display a URL or file (be sure “Allow pop-ups” is selected when you run this example). In this case, the full http: address of the Excel file placed in the IFS in the previous step is specified.

Finally, enter the following command:

50 SWIOPEN NEW(*NO) TITLE(’SEQUEL Web Interface’) ROWSET((100)) COLSET((1 100 ‘http://servername/SEQUEL’))

This second SWIOPEN command returns the original browser window to the SEQUEL Web Interface prompt page.

This script displays results in a browser in native Excel format, and you can save the file to your local PC or a network drive.