May 25, 2010
The work management tasks have been available with the GUI
interface (System i Navigator) for many releases. However, there are some
pretty cool things in the work management GUI that I'm sure not everyone knows
about, even though they’ve been available for quite some time. These tasks are
also in the IBM Systems Director Navigator for i Web console with the 6.1
release. In addition, some new features have been added in the 7.1 release. In
this blog, I'm going to review some of these little-known features through the
IBM Systems Director Navigator for i Web interface.
Server Jobs
The green screen interfaced has “Work with Active Jobs”, but
on the GUI you can also work with Server Jobs. There are a couple nice features
that the server jobs view provides:
-
It shows the current user profile for that job
(which WRKACTJOB was changed to do in 6.1)
-
It shows a text description of what that server
job is for in the “Server” column. This lets you identify what a server job is
for without understanding the cryptic IBM job naming convention.
-
Using the “Include...” dialog, you can also
select to display completed jobs with output (whereas with Active Jobs, you can
only display … active jobs!)
Job Details
For both Server Jobs and Active Jobs, you can display
information about a job through the GUI that you can’t see from the Work with
Job green-screen interface.
-
There is a column, Thread Count, shown by
default that shows you the number of threads in the job, which allows you to
easily identify multithreaded jobs.
-
Under Open Files, you can also display file
system objects used by the job, not just files in a library.
-
With the SQL option, you can view the most
recent SQL statement executed by that job and get additional information about
that SQL statement – there's some pretty cool information here – the SQL
statement itself, information about the environment such as the client
application, client IP address, the interface on which the client request was
received and much more.
-
For active jobs, you can also display
information about Transactions associated with the job (this is not available for Server
Jobs).
In the 7.1 release, for active jobs, you now have improved
integration and navigation to various performance tasks. Under Performance, you
can now “Investigate Job Wait Data”; this will take you to a chart that
displays the wait information for that job from Collection Services. See my
blog article, “i Can …Tell You Why You're Waiting” for more information on IBM i wait accounting.
And as the screen capture shows, you can also start the Job
Watcher performance data collector for an active job. You can also select
“Investigate Jobs Wait Data,” “Investigate Jobs Statistics Data” and “Start Job
Watcher” from the “Select Action” drop-down bar. If you have a single job
selected, the action will apply to that selected job. If no job is selected,
the action will be taken for all active jobs.
Note that for these new options to be displayed, you must
have Collection Services active; Collection Services has been started by
default since the 6.1 release.
The GUI also has some nice features related to Memory Pools.
If you view the Active Memory Pools, you have an option to display the jobs or
subsystems that are running in a Memory Pool. This is something that’s only
available on the GUI.
Posted May 25, 2010| Permalink
