Message Management eBook

A

/systems Company

A GUIDE TO IBM

MESSAGE
MANAGEMENT
AUTOMATION HOW TO’S

ROI

CHOOSING A TOOL

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©Help/Systems, LLC. All trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. A041MM3

1

A GUIDE TO IBM

Message mANAGEMENT
A

/systems Company

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION

PART I: MONITORING
PART II: FILTERING
PART III: ESCALATING AND MODIFYING
PART IV: HOW TO GET ‘BEST’

SECTION

OF

TABLE

BROUGHT TO YOU BY

SECTION 1: BETTER,
BEST
okay,

2 SOLUTION
: CHOOSING A

PART I: MONITORING
PART IV: THE
BOTTOM LINE
PART II: FILTERING
PART III: ESCALATING & NOTIFYING

2

INTRODUCTION
The IBM i operating system generates a lot of messages. These messages—which communicate information about the system, applications,
and more—should help administrators and operators gauge system
performance, uphold SLAs, and solve problems.
Unfortunately, without the right tools and processes, monitoring IBM i
messages is like trying to count drops in a downpour: You might get
one or two, but you’ll never keep up with what seems like an infinite
amount. Unlike getting a little wet, the consequences of missing an
IBM i message—like taking down your entire system—go far beyond IT.
Your company’s most business-critical applications and data are hosted
on the i. Do you want to explain to your CIO or CFO why their critical
application is unavailable because of problems on your system?
So, you need help—help to pick out only those messages that you need.
This white paper teaches you how to handle Message Management on
your IBM i: The process of monitoring for messages, filtering the critical
ones, and assigning them to members of your team as fast as possible.
We’ve broken down each step and provided you with a range of options
(Okay, Better, and Best) along the way. It’s up to you to decide which
solutions are going to work best for your system, needs, and budget.



3

SECTION 1:
PART I: MONITORing

OKAY

OKAY,

BETTER,

BEST

MANUAL BREAK MESSAGES OR DSPMSG QSYSOPR
Before we get to manual break messages, let’s address the “use” of
DSPMSG QSYSOPR, which is the practice of only looking at messages
when a user reports a problem. If you are doing this: Stop it! You’re
endangering your system!
Implementing manual break messages is as simple and straightforward
as having someone sit in front of a screen. And this method is foolproof—if the person watching the screen never eats, never sleeps, and
intimately knows every application and how to respond to every single
message, without a runbook. There are so many messages, you won’t
have time to look away from the latest message, even though it’s probably
a routine completed process…or is it? Did you just look away again?
Oh, there’s another one!
Many shops across the country waste talented staff on this mindnumbing method. The truth is it isn’t a real way to deal with the quantity of
messages that IBM i produces. Nobody knows every application, people
sometimes answer messages incorrectly or miss them altogether—
and then there’s the problem of informational messages. In this manual
method, we’ve only considered break messages that require a response;


this leaves out loads of informational messages. Most are not important,
but some are crucial for the operator to know. Battery cache errors?
Disk drive failure? If you miss those, your system could go down.
If you don’t have another option, you can set up break messages
based on the severity level of an informational message (0 being the
lowest, 99 the highest). When you do, make sure to ask yourself and
your colleagues how high you should set the severity break levels. If
you set the threshold too high, you might miss some that are critical,
and if you set them too low, you’ll be inundated with messages.

BETTER REPLY LIST ENTRIES
SET UP SYSTEM
Nothing can take the place of dedicated monitoring software, but in
a pinch, you can try setting up System Reply List entries. Use the command WRKRPYLE to see the reply list entries already set up on your
system. Command ADDRPYLE is used to add new reply instructions
to the list. These provide partial automation of your monitoring, plus
limited capabilities to interrogate and respond to messages.
This method can help you with automating inquiry messages if the
response is the same regardless of the message details; or if you need
to pick out some small bit of text from the message to refine your
automatic response.
Unfortunately, the benefits stop there. System Reply Lists do not allow
flexibility—if your system needs to answer a message differently
depending on the time of day or week, you can’t. If you need to respond
differently based on the occurrence of other system events, you can’t.
Without the ability to set limits on jobs, problem scenarios could loop


4

PART I: MONITORing (CONTINUED)
and chew up CPU and DASD. And the fact is, every environment is
different and requires different things depending on the time. A onesize-fits-all approach to message response is destined to cause you
problems down the road.

BEST INTERFACE WITH “AT A GLANCE” CAPABILITIES
GRAPHICAL
You have more important things to do than try to parse the flood of
messages that come in throughout the day. Graphical interfaces take
information collected for critical metrics on your system and display
them visually, which allows you to check your system with a quick
glance at a graph, chart, or table. Ideally, a tool should have a robust
history function so you can also quickly compare your current performance to recent trends and historical averages.
A talented in-house or contract programmer will likely be able to put
together an application that achieves many of these features. Unfortunately, ad-hoc applications, even at $100 an hour in development,
don’t have (or keep up with) APIs, aren’t easily able to be updated, and
don’t have a security layer to address compliance issues. When it comes
to such a specialized function, your best bet is a specialized tool.


PART II:

FILTERING

OKAY CHEAT SHEETS, AND MEMORY
RUNBOOKS,
The world of IBM i messages is a big one. Informational, application,
or system-related messages come in a variety of types, and they come
from an even greater variety of places throughout your system. Because
the source of your message is the most important part—that’s how you
know what it is about--and because different members of your team are
responsible for different areas of operation, the ability to get a message
from its source to the right person is crucial. Codifying this in a runbook
or cheat sheet is not ideal—especially for those forgettable once-amonth messages—and if different operators handle messages differently,
it can be a huge headache.

BETTER
SET UP QSYSMSG
To funnel system messages related to security and hardware, IBM i
allows you to set up a narrow message queue to complement the primary channel. QSYSMSG will help you monitor system power-down
messages, alerts that storage thresholds have been exceeded, notices
of weak battery, and others. The visibility to these specific kinds of
problems is useful, and is a good start for an environment that currently
doesn’t filter messages at all. But this method has limitations—namely
that these messages don’t solve the underlying issues of determining
which messages are important, what and how to escalate, and whether


5

PART II: FILTERING (CONTINUED)
you’re missing important messages. The difference is that you now
have two places to look for them! If you run a smaller environment,
this will put even more strain on your limited resources.

BEST THE NOISE
GET RID OF
The key to message management is finding the signal through the
noise. To do this, you need to suppress the messages you don’t need,
highlight the ones that need a response, and immediately escalate
those important messages that require immediate attention. To do
this, consider a third party tool that gives you the ability to assign
rules which will automatically filter incoming messages accordingly.

PART III:

ESCALATING & NOTIFYING

OKAY
BE THE MESSENGER
This is as simple as it sounds: When a message comes through that
needs escalation, pick up the phone and consult the programmer
about how to handle it. This old-fashioned way is time-consuming,
and not always the most convenient—especially if it requires waking
that programmer up at 3 am! Of course, you also have to be there to
catch the right message in the first place—as unlikely to happen as
your programmer being happy about that 3 am phone call.

BETTER
BROADCAST LISTS
Building a list of names to manually email when a problem occurs is a
good homemade remedy for escalation. You can also set up a triggered
SMTP email to the same list, which takes the manual work of sending
the email off of your plate but still requires the recipients to figure out—
likely in a long email chain—who should handle the resolution.

BEST ESCALATION
AUTOMATIC
Immediate escalation is key for timely resolution of issues, and for this
there is no substitute for an automation tool. When events are barreling



6

PART III: ESCALATING AND NOTIFYING (CONTINUED)
down QSYSOPR, there’s no way a human can parse, sift, and pass on
the important messages to the team. That’s why automation tools are
set up for operators to assign rules that escalate different messages
to different staff. This approach takes the old “tribal knowledge” and
replicates it--but also, by being transparent and codified, is open to
editing when your staff or your environment changes!
It is also flexible: Want a message to go different places based on
the day of the week or time of day? Want an unanswered message
to re-escalate to someone else after, say, 10 minutes? A professional
tool worth its salt will give you that flexibility.
Automation tools also bring an important element to escalation:
Accountability and responsibility. Automatically escalated messages
take the hot potato from QSYSOPR and pass it to the responsible
member. If the issue isn’t getting resolved, that signals a problem
either with staffing or with staff. With a transparent and automated
escalation process, your team will be set up to handle messages as
soon as possible.
The available technology also affects your staff’s ability to respond. Sure,
VPN is common enough, but nobody can always be near their laptop. So
what happens when a critical message comes through and the relevant
operator is in the checkout line? The right tool brings you into the 21st
century with 2-way response for mobile phones and tablets.


PART IV:

HOW TO GET ‘BEST’

If professional tools didn’t cost anything, every IT department would
have one. But it isn’t a perfect world, and we have to make choices
with limited means. So how should you decide whether a professional
solution is worth it? Or, more likely, how do you justify the purchase
to your boss? Here are a couple things to consider:

PROFESSIONAL TOOLS ARE AN

INSURANCE POLICY
Big problems are just little problems that were ignored long enough.
And in the case of IBM i messages, it is incredibly easy to “ignore” a
problem—you could be working overtime and still end up “ignoring”
the message that takes down your system!
The likelihood of that happening is small, thankfully, but the risk is so
great that it is worth investing in resources to prevent it. The insurance
and peace of mind that a professional tool gives you not only makes it
easier for your team to do its job, it pays for itself in operational and
financial stability. (You can also think of it as a supplemental high
availability plan—this helps guarantee your SLAs.)


7

PART IV: HOW TO GET ‘BEST’ (CONTINUED)
PROFESSIONAL TOOLS SAVE RESOURCES AND ARE

CHEAPER THAN OUTSOURCING
While monitoring takes a lot of man-hours, in some countries man-hours
are quite inexpensive. As a result, the low-activity overnight shifts at
many shops have been used to justify shipping an entire team’s jobs
to another continent. Fortunately, automating this incredibly important
aspect of your operations is far cheaper than outsourcing. Even better,
adopting a professional not only saves your team time from tedious and
unrewarding work—it frees you up to make a dent in the proactive,
innovative work you’ve been itching to start.

PROFESSIONAL TOOLS ARE NECESSARY TO MAINTAIN AN

ENTERPRISE ENVIRONMENT
IBM i is the core system for thousands of leading logistics, manufacturing,
technology, healthcare, and financial organizations worldwide. To run
a sophisticated, cross-platform environment, you need to make sure
processes can move cross-platform from IBM i to the warehouse, CFO’s
office, or another critical department. In the case of consumerfacing operations, this need is just as crucial: Your i is likely the platform
supplying the data customers need.
Of course, smooth cross-platform processing isn’t the only hallmark of a
well-run environment: You are judged on how your system satisfies audits,
helps end users, meets SLAs, and contributes to a healthier bottom line.
For each of these, a professional solution for message management
will improve your department’s performance and ease its workload.


SUMMING IT UP
As you evaluate tools for managing messages, you’ll want to consider
a few things. First, a solution needs to automate your IBM i message
monitoring, filtering, and your escalating and notifying. Second, it needs
to address end-goals like those mentioned above: Does it have features
to help you satisfy audits? Will the tools stabilize your environment and
take some end-user and SLA pressure off your back? And then there’s
configuration: Will this tool have smart, preset configurations that work
out of the box? Or will I have to spend months of implementing a minimalist tool with spotty support?
There’s one other item to consider. While any tool is an improvement
over doing nothing, that answer won’t satisfy the person who controls
the purse strings. Your solution needs to improve operations in a way
that can be quantified. For that kind of solution, you need a solution
with dashboards, documentation, and rules-based controls that shows
everyone from your boss to your auditors how you’ve taken your work
to the next level.
Management will be impressed when you pitch a solution with concrete,
quantifiable benefits. But they’ll be even more impressed if you show
that its products sync as a broader solution for systems management.
If the products were cobbled together, their benefits will be too narrow
to build on. If, however, they were designed to work
with each other, you won’t need to do much
persuading: Cohesive, complimentary
tools that lay a groundwork for
operations is the holy grail in
this industry.


8

:

SECTION

2 CHOOSING A SOLUTION
Once you make the decision to work with a professional tool, it’s time to go shopping. Because your choice impacts everything from
cross-platform operations to your budget to SLAs, it’s a good idea to break down each option by how it helps you Monitor, Filter, and
Escalate your crucial IBM i messages. You’ll also want to consider how well a solution’s products integrate with each other and with
your environment. Finally, you’ll want to make a wish list of some results you want to get out of your solution.

Here’s a few to start:
• Automate & centralize message and performance monitoring
across IBM i

• Mobile & desktop response
• Help us prevent small problems from becoming big crises
• Free up our team’s operations and cut down on tedious work
• Keep better track of critical jobs, subsystems, devices
• Speed up our response time to critical issues
• Spend less time “fighting fires” and troubleshooting problems
• Save money on overtime hours
• Make meeting SLAs easier
• Make cross-platform operations easier
• Make business processes more stable
• BIG GOALS: Stop Stress, Get More Efficient, Stay Better Informed
on System Issues, Save Time, Effort & Money!
With the Robot Message Management solution, you can check off every
last one of the boxes above.


So, what gives Robot the ability to do all that? 3 powerful systems
management tools combine to make up the Robot Message Management solution.

ROBOT/NETWORK ROBOT/CONSOLE ROBOT/ALERT
AUTOMATED PERFORMANCE

MONITORING & MANAGEMENT

AUTOMATED MESSAGE

MANAGEMENT & MONITORING

AUTOMATED NOTIFICATION
& MOBILE RESPONSE

Developed in-house to work seamlessly with each other, Robot/NETWORK, Robot/CONSOLE, and Robot/ALERT are backed by 30 years of
expertise in automating systems management for Power Systems running
IBM i. Powering environments from the largest, most complex IBM iand IBM i-connected systems to the medium and small shops that
rely on IBM i to store their critical data and applications, our Message
Management solution leverages the stability and feature-rich IBM i
platform with custom, flexible scripting, intuitive graphic interfaces,
mobile capability, plus a security layer to satisfy your corporate policies
and IT audits. Combined, these tools bring you comprehensive feature
sets that automate identifying, sorting, and assigning messages.


9

PART I:

MONITORING

Robot/CONSOLE was built to handle even the most oppressive loads
of IBM i messages. Automatically and 24x7, it handles your job queues,
subsystems, devices, objects, TCP/IP services, printers, and more. And
instead of checking each queue and each virtual machine individually,
Robot/NETWORK brings them all into one console for central, intuitive
viewing in charts, graphs, and tables that update in real-time.
Robot/NETWORK also lets you monitor the status of your entire IBM i
network from a single PC display. Its Status Center gives you flexibility
for escalation, assignment, and displaying properties throughout the
network. Notification options can also be combined to escalate statuses,
which can be triggered in succession or sent at the same time.

PART II:

FILTERING

Routine messages which today flood your queues, Robot/CONSOLE
automatically diverts from your attention. But when something
important does happen, Robot/ALERT will automatically notify the
most appropriate person—according to custom rules that fit your
environment—via email, text, pager, or browser interface. From their
email client, the expert can respond to the message like they would to
a message from anyone: Type the response, then send it off. Robot/
ALERT’s 2-Way Messaging feature routes the message back to Robot/
CONSOLE and Robot/NETWORK, which execute your response.

RBT ALERT
Night backup did not
complete normally.

Close

Reply

In addition to suppressing the messages you don’t need, the solution
highlights the messages that do need a response and immediately
escalates the important ones that require your or a colleague’s immediate
attention.
The power behind this and Robot’s other intuitive features is called OPAL,
or OPerator Assistance Language, a custom scripting language that
gives you sophisticated options for processing messages. With the power
to check the contents of message variables, OPAL gives the Message
Management Solution ability to respond by executing commands, calling programs, canceling jobs, and forwarding to staff experts for help.



10

PART III: ESCALATING & NOTIFYING
The Robot Message Management solution is like your staff expert—
except it will not one day retire and take its knowledge with it out the
door. Instead of dreading the impending retirement or worrying about
when an employee leaves, you can codify their expertise in the sophisticated rules provided by Robot/CONSOLE—in effect, guaranteeing that
each message will automatically receive the best possible response and
with it, the stability of your environment. Whether a particular message
should be funneled to one person or a team, escalated after 20 minutes
or after 10, or given personal attention or a canned response, Robot
Message Management is like replicating the best judgment of your best
employee indefinitely.

PART IV:

THE BOTTOM LINE

Just like with each of the categories in this paper, there are three basic
responses to the challenge of message management on Power Systems
running IBM i. The first is to keep doing what you’re doing—and risk
missing crucial messages as you either ignore or drown in the sea of
routine, informational messages that don’t tell you anything about
your system.
An easy and big way to improve on the status quo is to reference the
‘Better’ section of this paper for free, clever ways to maximize the native
tools IBM i puts at your disposal. In some cases they will introduce a little
more complexity, but overall, these tweaks will help you catch more of
your important IBM i messages—among which are the behemoths that,
if not dealt with, can take down your system and the critical business
processes that rely on it.
Finally, there’s the ideal response—the response that costs some money
up front but pays for itself many times over. Quality message management solutions will automatically monitor your queues and suppress
the junk; they will give you flexible ways to respond that work for your
team and your environment; and they will do it automatically so that
your team can focus on the more meaningful projects you’ve all been
waiting to do.

Ready to see Message Management in your environment?
Try the Robot Message Management solution free for 30 days
at www.helpsystems.com/trymessages.

Robot/NETWORK

Robot/CONSOLE

Robot/ALERT



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