Monitoring in IMS test environments

Your objectives for monitoring during a test phase are slightly different from those for production systems

Three activities you should plan for are:

• Detecting and correcting potential performance problems before entry into production mode.

  Using realistic data, you can expose patterns of processing for the application programs, especially the DL/I call occurrences. Compare the Monitor results against the expected transaction profile. Such items as excessive I/O events or large I/O wait times can reveal a performance problem at an early stage.

• Testing the monitoring part of your operations procedures.

  Become familiar with the way output is produced and the format and content of reports. Start to develop work sheets to summarize Monitor findings rather than write unstructured comments on the report output.

  Related reading: See Collecting and interpreting IMS monitoring data for information about the detailed report descriptions and considerations and tools for your monitoring strategy.

• Using your monitoring tools for base profiles of new program processing.

  Discuss your findings with development personnel and with performance specialists. Try to obtain early warning of performance problems. If you are integrating a new application into an existing online IMS system, try to assess beforehand the impact of the added application workload.

During the testing stage you can also perform stand-alone or calibration runs to establish base profiles for the critical transactions. The Call Summary report from the IMS Monitor is useful for this purpose. You can also compare the results for the tested transactions to similar transactions already in the production system.