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System z Experts Discuss OMEGAMON, Rational Software and More

Editor’s note: This is the second article in a series derived from the “IBM System z Essential Session: Panel Discussion with the Big Brains of Big Blue,” conducted at IBM Impact 2012 in May.

During the “IBM System z Essential Session: Panel Discussion with the Big Brains of Big Blue” at IBM Impact 2012, the seven expert panelists were unable to address all of the questions submitted by IBM Systems Magazine readers. In this article, Chris Walker, an IBM Tivoli software developer working in service availability and performance management for System z, and Rosalind Radcliffe, an IBM Distinguished Engineer responsible for collaborative development solutions for System z, respond to some of those questions.

Q: If a comparison is done between IBM z/OS Resource Management Facility (RMF) and OMEGAMON XE on z/OS, which one has more features?

Walker: The short answer is OMEGAMON XE on z/OS, however, the two products are complementary and should not be considered as an alternative to each other.

RMF is a hardware resource consumption collector that captures metrics at short intervals and then store them in System Management Facility (SMF) records at longer intervals. Typically, customers use a 15-minute collection interval, though, occasionally less-frequent intervals, such as 30 minutes or an hour, are used to save disk and tape space to record it. This data is typically post processed for capacity-planning reasons, though, there is some capabilities to do exception analysis. RMF is not System z Integrated Information Processor (zIIP)-enabled to reduce its CPU on general-purpose processors.

IBM Tivoli OMEGAMON XE on z/OS is a real-time performance monitor and part of the IBM Tivoli Monitoring family of products on System z. It pre-requires RMF for part of its data and metric collection by requesting the current data from RMF before it gets hardened to SMF. A real-time monitor—every time you hit the enter key, we get an updated view of resource consumption, which is displayed either on the Tivoli Enterprise Portal GUI or the new Enhanced 3270 UI. In addition to the data collected from RMF, we gather hundreds of other metrics from other sources. OMEGAMON also has deep-dive capabilities, which gather metrics on demand that would be too CPU intensive to get on a continuous basis for all workloads. It can also integrate with other OMEGAMON monitors (for example, OMEGAMON XE for CICS on z/OS) within the same user interface.

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