Storage Toolkit

With Storage Toolkit, you can initiate z/OS commands from Tivoli Enterprise Portal (TEP). Note that the monitoring agent uses the portal user ID to establish the security environment and the security environment is unique to the user who submits the request. Hence, you must ensure to take security measures before initiating any commands.

You can use Storage Toolkit to issue the following commands on the z/OS system where the monitoring agent is running.

  • DFSMSdss (Device Support Services)
  • DFSMShsm (Hierarchical Storage Manager)
  • ICKDSF (Device Support Facilities)
  • IDCAMS (Access Method Services)
  • DFSMSrmm (DFSMS Removable Media Manager)
  • Mainframe (z/OS console command)
  • TSO (Time Sharing Option)

Additionally, you can also submit requests to execute user-defined JCL streams. All requests run as batch jobs on the z/OS system.

Tasks that the monitoring agent performs to complete a request are executed under a security environment on the z/OS system where the monitoring agent runs. A security environment is created when you submit a request and is destroyed when the request ends. The types of activities that are processed within the security context include:

  • Creating and accessing temporary datasets required for the batch job
  • Submitting the batch job
  • Accessing the JCL dataset and other datasets that contain substitution variables (when processing user-defined JCL)

These security environment is unique to the user who submits the request, because the monitoring agent uses the portal user ID to establish the security environment. In this approach, the user accounts (IDs) defined to the portal server must match the mainframe IDs on the z/OS system where the monitoring agent runs. If a user attempts to submit a request when the portal ID is also not a valid mainframe user ID, the request fails.

You can create user accounts after you complete and validate the configuration. You must first determine the mainframe IDs of your users and then define user accounts with matching IDs to the portal server.

To ensure the security of Storage Toolkit commands, some type of security authentication must govern the users who log on to the Tivoli Enterprise Portal. If you use a UNIX -based hub monitoring server, the user IDs on the monitoring server must match the user IDs on the z/OS system that hosts the monitoring agent.