Ron,
You definitely want to go to logstreams. We went to CF logstreams 10 years ago
and have never regretted it. And that is the first question you need to answer:
coupling facility, which is sysplex-wide, or DASD-only? That will affect all
your other decisions.
The next thing you need to do is see how much data you dump per day and in what
records. That will help you determine what logstreams you want to use. Sadly,
the picture IBM paints of keeping data in the logstream is not practical shops.
Collecting over 100 gigabytes of data per day is not unusual; that does not
lend itself to practical long term storage. You also need to determine how
much disk space you are willing to give to offload datasets. While this is
less of a concern for most shops than it was 10 years ago, it is still
something you want to factor in. When we did our original calculations, we
were comfortable keeping far less than a single day on disk. We period archive
- archive, not dump - to tape, and consolidate at daily and weekly levels. You
should save room for more offload datasets than you expect to handle the times
the archive process breaks.
On your question of return code 4 on the logstream dump, our archive jobs
accept 4 as okay because of the message you cite. The archive process will
fail, not merely RC=4, if it doesn't work. Again, test this for yourself; it
will make you feel better and give you more confidence in your process.
Best of luck!
Jim Horne
-Original Message-
I'm trying to figure out the best-practice for collecting SMF data with
Logstream instead of MAN datasets. There are few points I seem to miss and I
hope to get some advice from those who used it for a while.
I can see the benefits in storing the SMF on logstream only, for example I can
use IFASMFDL to set range of dates and not have to worry about the location of
each week/month in a different GDG generation.
Also, the ability of logger to use the timestamp to read only relevant period
can save time and CPU while offloading data in comparison to sequential read.
Those benefit however are minified if I use the logstream only as a short-term
storage before migrating the data to the regular GDG datasets.
Here are some open questions I have:
1. The ideal situation for me would be to have all SMF data on logstream, for
example for a period of two years, but there is a limit of 168 offload datasets
before starting to use DSEXTENTs and each dataset can be up to about 2GB in
size, this makes me wonder if I misunderstood the Logstream usage as a long
term storage of smf data.
Does it make sense to hold SMF data for few years on logstream?
2. Using the IFASMFDL utility is very tricky as I can get RC 4 for both
"RELATIVEDATE RANGE EXTENDS INTO FUTURE" and for a case where I ran the job on
a different system (DASD-only logstream) and it failed to find the logstream.
Worse than that, if I try to dump data from few offload datasets (a week for
example) and one of the "middle" datasets is missing I can get a return code of
0 while the data returned will be only what Logger was able to find.
How can I be sure that the dumped data from IFASMFDL is complete?
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