Hardware and Software Cost Control
EPV for z/OS Resource provides a complete vision of the “health” condition for all critical resources of your systems, especially those shared amongst different z/OS systems such as processors (including zAAP, zIIP and crypto), disks, physical control units, coupling facilities and channels. An integrated Enterprise view is presented and identifies any saturation points or performance efficiency problems. The time period and resource causing the bottleneck can be easily identified by the intuitive use of colour coding.

EPV for z/OS WLC supports the IBM software costs policy, providing all the necessary metrics to manage the MSU utilization both at system and subsystem level. EPV reports the highest “4 hours rolling average” value, used by IBM to charge its monthly fee.

Performance Analysis know-how embedded
EPV for z/OS Workload provides a complete vision of all the workloads running on your systems. Utilizing extensive drill-down capabilities, you can explore workload performance and consumption at the address space or transaction level. For Batch, CICS, DDF, IMS, MQ and WebSphere workloads, throughput, consumption and response times are identified for critical jobs and transactions.

EPV for z/OS Trend vision provides daily and monthly productivity and resource consumptions trends at the system and workload levels. This will assist in the understanding of workload growth and its impact on your systems. An advanced statistical methodology spots positive or negative growth trends that lie outside of a normal distribution. Regression analysis is also performed to estimate CPU latent demand of saturated systems.

Automatic Control of Configuration Changes
EPV for z/OS Configuration provides a detailed report of the hardware and software configuration for the z/OS and OS/390 environments, including the total DASD space by provider and physical control unit. EPV provides a global view of shared resources, such as machines (CEC), Coupling Facilities and Storage Processors by correlating data produced by different sources and systems.

EPV for z/OS audits configuration changes at the hardware, system and software level.

Access to available data
EPV for z/OS uses standard measures normally available in the z/OS environments and supports various sources, such as ITRM (IT Resource Management), MXG (Merrill’s eXpanded Guide) or native SMF, RMF and IMS data. EPV optimises data collection by using existing summarised data, limiting the number of variables, using intelligent filters and avoiding data duplication and redundancy. The product’s architecture is modular and user friendly. EPV can be installed on most of the popular hardware and software platforms available on the market.

Using “de facto” Standard Technologies
All reports are produced in simple static HTML pages published on a server of your choice and can be accessed by your favourite “browser”. All the tables provided in the reports can be exported individually or together in a MS-Excel spread sheet.

Architecture
EPV for z/OS architecture is based on the following three layers:
• An interface to collect input data
• An engine to correlate and aggregate data
• An engine to produce HTML pages.
The interface to collect input data is designed to optimize performance and consumptions of the loading phase, avoiding duplication or loss of data. It uses simple exits that adapt the product to the environment characteristics; a set of ready exits for each data type to acquire is provided.

The engine to correlate and aggregate data builds a standard SAS or SQL relational Data Base, containing only those metrics used by the product and automatically aggregated at the monthly, daily and hourly level. You can customize the product by setting the appropriate parameters and values to keep in your EPV Performance Data Base the desired time periods.

The engine to produce the HTML pages can be customize to:
• Report daily resource and workload statistics for any desired period
• Report daily, weekly and monthly trends for any desired period
• Report Top (Address Space, batch, DDF, IMS, CICS, MQ and WEBSPHERE transactions) consumers
• and much more…

Requirements
EPV for z/OS is available in two modes: standard or Plus.

The requirements for EPV for z/OS are:
• Availability of a SAS System Base module at least on a PC
• Availability of one of the following products: SAS ITRM, MXG.

EPV for z/OS Plus has no pre-requisites; it’s an “out of the box” solution which integrates a light version of the EPV zParser product to interpret the needed SMF records and all the other input data required.