You need to ensure that the journal does not fill up because a full journal can impact tape usage on your system. You can run regular backups as part of inventory management in order to clear the journal. Automating control data set backup and clearing the journal help to ensure that the journal does not fill up.

To automate the clearing of the journal, follow these steps:

1. Specify a value for JOURNALFULL operand on the OPTION command in parmlib as described in Defining system options: OPTION. If you do not specify a value, DFSMSrmm uses a value of 75%. Use only a single system to trigger backup using the journal threshold. If you have multiple systems and the journal threshold is reached, each system can start the backup procedure at the same time if you use the same threshold number. To avoid this situation if you have multiple systems, you can specify a different threshold on each system. For example, specify a threshold of 75% on the main system where DFSMSrmm is active and then specify thresholds of 80% and 85% for your other systems. You can also disable threshold processing on a system by specifying a zero value. Ensure that the systems you select have DFSMSrmm active and have a high chance of processing DFSMSrmm requests. A system that processes no or few DFSMSrmm requests is a bad choice for automatic backup because DFSMSrmm only checks the journal threshold when a request is processed.
2. Create a backup procedure in the system procedure library. The backup procedure that you write should use EDGHSKP to backup the control data set and journal because EDGHSKP also clears the journal. To automate the clearing of the journal without backing up the control data set, write your backup procedure to backup just the journal. See Automating backup for an example of a procedure that runs backup as part of inventory management. Alternatively, you might want to use the procedure to submit a batch job to perform the backup or to inform your job scheduler to submit the job. DFSMSrmm will not start the procedure if backup is already in progress. See Event triggered tracking for information about using the IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler for z/OS.
3. Specify the procedure name for the BACKUPPROC operand of the OPTION command in parmlib as described in Defining system options: OPTION. DFSMSrmm starts this procedure when the journal threshold is reached. If you do not specify a procedure name, you cannot automate backup using DFSMSrmm. However, you could still use the EDG2107E message as a trigger for your site automation processes.