My .02 I view the SMF Type 99 data as part of the z/OS "Flight Recorder" you don't need it till you want it then it is priceless. The cost of not saving it may be recreating a painful performance problem or worse unable to recreate waiting for it to recur in production. A large 4 member production Sysplex here cuts something like 2,522,546 SMF 99 records daily but only this day that is only 2.61 % of the total SMF. It is not significant when compared to the volume of CICS and DB2 SMF data we keep. You can choose to retain these temporarily as recent past data in case you need them. We finally decided it was easier to just include them in our archive tapes went against the grain with our data management team to throw anything away. If you go spelunking there is some interesting data in the Type 99's to understand things that are happening on your system. Hopefully you are also recording SMF Type 113 with HIS if on z10 or newer also data that can be very useful and again once you don't record it you cannot go back and get it.
Best Regards, Sam Knutson, GEICO System z Team Leader mailto:[email protected] (office) 301.986.3574 (cell) 301.996.1318 "Think big, act bold, start simple, grow fast..." -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mark Yuhas Sent: Wednesday, August 22, 2012 4:07 PM To: [email protected] Subject: SMF Type 99 quandry According to the MVS Programming Workload Management Services manual, a Type SMF 99 record is written every policy interval (approximately 10 seconds). I have 5 LPARs - 3 production, 1 LPAR just constructed and 2 test LPARs. The SMF activity for the 2 test LPARs and the newly constructed ones is more than I expected. I reviewed the SUMMARY ACTIVITY REPORT and discovered an inordinate amount of Type 99 records. I did some calculations for each LPAR and discovered that, on average, there are 5.16 Type 99 records being written every second. Not one every 10 seconds. Either the policy interval time length has changed or these Type 99 records are being written by some other component. What am I missing? Yes, I could turn off writing the Type 99 records. But, is this indicative of some other problem? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ==================== This email/fax message is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution of this email/fax is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please destroy all paper and electronic copies of the original message. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
