Visara Master Console Center Consultants Manual - Manual (Page 7)

Master Console Center
MCC
March 2007
MCCSTARS MVS Agent
Overview
T he Visara MCCSTARS MVS agent is designed to cope with MVS’s message traffic and offload
most filtering from the MCC server. MVS LPARs typically limit operator messages so that
operations personnel don’t see many messages. Unfortunately, in critical situations MVS LPARs
can create hundred or thousands of messages a second. When managing 10s to 100s of LPARs it
becomes imperative to intercept console messages at the source thereby offloading processing of
screen scraping and filtering from the MCC server. Competitive products do not operate in this
manor and typically do screen scraping at the server level, which requires the most powerful
servers and typically still have slow-downs during message storms. In addition, competitive
products often require consoles to be placed in “Roll Deletable” mode to quickly detect when
action messages are deleted. If messages on these consoles back up, MVS may experience a
WTO buffer shortage and, in extreme cases, shut down.
MCCSTARS is designed for high traffic. Out of the box it only passes messages flagged
as important by the issuing program to the MCC server. There, user customizable MCC
GCL scripts can further refine processing. Again, out of the box messages and WTORs
are used to create MCC alerts. As operations personnel resolve problems and perform necessary
actions, MVS software indicates that messages are to be deleted. MCCSTARS passes this
information to MCC and deletes the associated alerts. In high traffic situations, MCCSTARS
meters out important messages to limit network and VCC traffic.
MCCSTARS uses industry standard SNMP for its network communication and only IBM
approved APIs for its MVS interface. Thus, it is protected from MVS changes and installs in
under an hour.
Customization
There are two optional methods of customizing MCCSTARS operation:
• MCCSTARS GCL user exit script
• MVS resident filtering facility
User Exit Script
The optional, MCCSTARS GCL user exit script can be customized by operations personnel to
ignore messages, change message text, change the alert color, route messages to specific classes
of operators and send SNMP traps to other software systems.
Many of customers route tape messages to tape operators only. If tapes are not mounted within a
site-determined time limit, the alerts are escalated to more senior operators.
Another use of the exit is to pass alerts to paging software via SNMP traps or to send email.
MVS Resident Filtering Facility
Optionally, MCCSTARS will also filter messages on MVS, before determining whether to ignore
them or send them on to the MCC server.
MCC Consultant's Manual
Page 7