How do I create a MainView Alarm?

There are a few quick and easy steps to create a MainView Alarm. Alarms are created the same way across all the MainView Monitoring solutions. This includes MainView AutoOPERATOR.

First sign on to MainView and from the main panel, navigate to a product you wish to create an Alarm in. For this example, we will build an alarm to detect the following

1. ZOS jobs that are consuming high CPU, as more than 95% of a CP more than 3 minutes.

To build this alarm to automate the monitoring of jobs using more the 95% of a CP resource for over 3 minutes, I will go to the MainView for zOS product and to the JCPU view. From this view I can find the %All CPU U field that displays the - Unadjusted CPU Utilization fiel, which contains the percentage of a single CPUs resources consumed on behalf of the address space during this interval. The unadjusted CPU utilization percent shows the percentage of a single processor used by the address space. As such, this percentage can exceed 100%, since multiple TCBs, SRBs, and enclaves in an address space can each use a processor at the same time.

From this view I just enter in the Command Line “Makealarm” AND put my cursor on this column. The position of the cursor let’s MainView know which metric in the view you want to create an alarm on.

The following sequence of views will be displayed to validate, update to create an alarm for the %ALL CPU U metric on the JCPU view.

The first Alarm panel is below. To move to the next panel, you enter a “N” in the command line and press enter and to go back to a previous panel enter a “B”.

Enter a “N” a press enter to get to the next panel. #2

Enter a “N” a press enter to get to the next panel, #3

On panel 3 we need to update two key areas.

First, we only want to be alerted when a job is using more than 95% of a CP for 3 minutes or more. To achieve this, we will update the “Persistence Checking” fields and enter in the Threshold.

The screen shot below shows the updates to the “Persistence” and “Threshold” fields

Enter a “N” a press enter to get to the next panel, #4

Enter a “N” a press enter to get to the next panel, #5

Type Save in the command line and hit enter to save the alarm.

Once the alarm has been Saved you will be automatically be on the “AMD” view. The AMD view displays a list of the alarm definitions sorted by definition name, library, and group.

To find the alarm I just created I use the MainView “Inc mask” command and enter my User ID in the “User” column.

You will notice be default, the Alarm definition was named the same as the view name used in the Alarm. From here I can activate my alarm to start monitoring the CPU of jobs by enter an “A” in the Line CMD