A raise of Mainframe Hands; performance IS an issue!
This week, during a large European Mainframe Conference (IDUG) I asked for a raise of hands. I simply wanted to understand if people were simply coping with performance issues OR if they were really managing the performance of their mainframe. No surprise, almost the entire audience told me they were merely coping.
After my session, I asked many at the booth why they thought this is such a problem these days and the reasons were simple; not enough staff, increased workloads and last but not least, not the right tools.
Due to a long period of recessions, near recessions and other economic uncertainty, our mainframes and the people managing them have suffered. Increased workloads, combined with delayed investments in additional MIPS have caused many performance issues. And the fact that we did not really manage the performance of our mainframe as an ongoing project made the problem even worse. Things have changed though and where we were simply coping with performance issues and treated them as a mere nuisance in the past, they are now costing our company serious money and they are causing us serious problems.
I cannot solve the staffing issues and I also cannot reduce your workload. I can however help you to change the way you deal with performance problems. From finger pointing to pinpointing and from reactive to proactive management. We often lose a lot of time figuring out what the problem exactly is. We either use different solutions that monitor different aspects of the Mainframe OR we don´t allow them to run in production because they like CPU cycles (…..). This prevents us from using them as proactive management tools and causes us to constantly run after the facts.
Last week, CA Technologies announced the latest version (9.0) of CA Mainframe Application Tuner (MAT). With a new graphical Interface, more functionality and very efficient use of expensive CPU cycles, CA MAT allows you to have it “switched on” constantly, so you get early warnings when things start to look “different”. And with the new graphical interface, drilling down to the root cause is even simpler. This will not only allow you and your peers to solve performance problems earlier in the cycle, it will also free up more time to start doing what you have not been able to do in a long time; proactively manage your performance, so you can prevent all the fire drills.
Click the link for more info on new CA Technologies Mainframe App Tuner. Performance management never looked so good!
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