What's new in IBM OMEGAMON for IMS on z/OS 5.5.0

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OMEGAMON® for IMS™ on z/OS 5.5.0 introduces many new features. The new features might affect your configuration and deployment of the monitoring agent. In addition, new topics and tools are also introduced in this release to provide enhanced information experience.

The following sections detail the new features in OMEGAMON for IMS on z/OS:

Component enhancements - Application Trace Facility

The following enhancements are made to the Application Trace Facility (ATF) component:
  • The ATF component uses 64-bit private memory. All of the 31-bit working storage that is used for data buffering is moved to 64-bit private memory, which reduces the 31-bit private storage requirement in OMEGAMON II for IMS classic region substantially. In addition, the new buffer structure has lower overhead on housekeeping.
  • ATF no longer uses separate log streams for the detail and exception detail records. Instead, detail and exception detail records are combined.

Enhanced information experience

Locate the information sections based on user roles
A user roadmap provides mapping of different user roles with their goals. By using the user roadmap, you can better understand the goals that you have and meanwhile gain quick access to the information section that you want.
In OMEGAMON for IMS on z/OS, the user roadmap provides a description of key roles and typical responsibilities of the product users associated with each goal.
Understand the monitoring resources on enhanced 3270 user interface and Tivoli® Enterprise Portal interface
OMEGAMON for IMS on z/OS provides monitoring resources in the z/OS®-based OMEGAMON enhanced 3270 user interface (e3270UI) and the graphical Tivoli Enterprise Portal (TEP) interface, which is based on distributed platforms. The monitoring resources include workspaces, attributes, and situations.
You can view the topics that describe the monitoring resources on different user interfaces in the User's Guide of the documentation. You can also quickly locate a workspace for a specific attribute of OMEGAMON for IMS on z/OS.
Find the explanation of error messages by using the IBM® Doc Buddy app
IBM Doc Buddy is available for download in both Apple App Store and Google Play. Once you install IBM Doc Buddy on your smart phone or tablet, you can find the explanations for error messages issued by OMEGAMON for IMS on z/OS within seconds. IBM Doc Buddy is helpful in environments from which the IBM OMEGAMON for IMS on z/OS: Troubleshooting Guide on the Internet is not directly accessible.
You can obtain IBM Doc Buddy from Apple App Store or from Google Play. Learn more.

PARMGEN improvements

Removed features
Because PARMGEN improvements are introduced in version 5.5.0, the following features or items are removed:
  • IBM OMEGAMON (CUA)
  • IMS Console Facility (I/CF)
  • XE Collector configuration
  • Over a hundred parameters
Simplified configuration into basic and advanced parameters
Individual settings as a configuration choice for the XE collectors are removed to simplify configuration workload and increase Time to Value (TTV).
The value for IMS Connect AUTODISCOVER is set to YES by default in PARMGEN.
z/OS Discovery Library Adapter (DLA) integration
The auto-discovery function of z/OS Discovery Library Adapter (DLA) is integrated in the PARMGEN configuration method to simplify the configuration process. During the configuration phase of the OMEGAMON for IMS on z/OS deployment, you can run the PARMGEN z/OS DLA jobs to automatically discover and fill in the values of some product parameters before you start to edit the configuration profiles. For more information, see Preparing the configuration profiles by running the KCIJPDLn jobs

User interface

IMS System Health workspace
The monitoring of the Bottleneck Analysis status and IMS Commander status is supported in the IMS System Health workspace. For more information, see IMSplex Filter attributes.
IMS Commander workspace
IMS Commander is implemented within the enhanced 3270 user interface and aggregates IMS Master Terminal Operations (MTO), application commands/responses, and z/OS Console messages of the various IMS address spaces into an easily viewable log. The log can be filtered by date/time as well as by message number. All IMS commands (Type-1 and Type-2) are supported within the IMS Commander workspaces.
The IMS Messages attribute group is added to access the Message repository that consists of IMS console traffic, dependent region messages, commands and the responses. You can use the IMS Messages attributes to view the messages from a certain period of time, origin, and string content to have an overall view of the application activity. For more information, see IMS Messages attributes.

Software requirements and interoperability with other products

Requirements for OMEGAMON for IMS on z/OS
Before using OMEGAMON for IMS on z/OS 5.5.0, ensure that the required operating system, IBM Tivoli® Monitoring, IMS, and Java™ levels are installed.

For detailed system requirements, including supported operating systems and required software, go to Software Product Compatibility Reports and select OMEGAMON for IMS on z/OS and version 5.5.0.

Supported products
OMEGAMON for IMS on z/OS 5.5.0 is compatible with any in-support version of IMS and IMS Connect Extensions for z/OS.

This release also supports monitoring specific CICS® TS regions and Db2® versions. For details on supported hardware and software, refer to the IMS Release Planning section in the IBM Information Management System (IMS) documentation for your IMS version.

For installation instructions, refer to the Program Directory for IBM OMEGAMON for IMS on z/OS.