Group buffer pool monitoring with the coupling facility activity report of RMF

You can use RMF coupling facility structure reports to monitor group buffer pools.

The figure below shows a portion of an example report.

A value for CHNGD ( B ) is the percentage of all accesses that were supposed to be done synchronously that had to be done asynchronously. The NO SCH field ( A ) indicates the amount of time that requests were queued because of a lack of subchannel resources. If the value in  B  is over 10% or so, and  A  contains a non-zero value, your configuration might not have enough subchannels to handle your systems' workload.

Figure 1. Portion of the RMF Coupling Facility Structure Activity report
STRUCTURE NAME = DSNDB0A_GBP8      TYPE = CACHE
          # REQ    -------------- REQUESTS -------------   -------------- DELAYED REQUESTS -------------
SYSTEM    TOTAL             #     % OF  -SERV TIME(MIC)-    REASON    #   % OF  ---- AVG TIME(MIC) -----
NAME      AVG/SEC           REQ    ALL     AVG   STD_DEV            REQ    REQ   /DEL    STD_DEV   /ALL
 
STLABC2   66662    SYNC     61K  43.2%   107.7     32.5      A 
          370.3    ASYNC  5677    4.0%   602.8    419.8     NO SCH    0   0.0%    0.0        0.0    0.0
                B  CHNGD     0    0.0%   INCLUDED IN ASYNC
                                                                 DUMP      0   0.0%    0.0        0.0