Log File Management

Operations Manager writes all of its messages to a log. The log provides a chronological audit trail of Operations Manager processing. It records settings, inbound and outbound message traffic, messages from users who trigger rules, when schedules occur, machine monitors, any commands issued, and so on. The information in the log can help with problem identification and resolution.

A new log is created when Operations Manager is started or when a message is logged for a new date. Because a log is created for each new day, the log file name is sysname yyyymmdd, where sysname is the z/VM system name, yyyy is the year, mm is the month, and dd is the day. If a log file for a specific day already exists when the log is started, the log output will be appended to that day’s log file.

Operations Manager places the log files on DASD accessed as file mode D. By default, this is the OPMGRM1 194 minidisk or the VMSYS:OPMGRM1.LOGS directory in SFS. If the D disk does not exist, no log files will be created. If the D disk location changes while Operations Manager is running, any new log files are written to the current D disk.

Before a new log file is created for a new date, Operations Manager runs GOMCLG EXEC to manage the space containing the log files. Before starting a new log file, GOMCLG removes the oldest log files on the D disk until the space of the D disk is less than 50%. If the log files are in a shared file system, Operations Manager cannot manage the log files because it cannot determine the amount of space within the shared file system to be allocated for log files. In this case, you can write your own space management routines to manage the log files within the shared space.
Note: It is recommended that you retain old log files for several days. You can do this by using the DEFSCHD command to automatically archive older log files in IBM Archive Manager for z/VM on a regular basis.