Transcript
And today's topic is what you should be monitoring on your IBMI. My name is Greg Schmidt. I'll be the moderator for today's webinar. We're excited to spend some time talking about proactive monitoring, why it matters, and how Robot Monitor can help IBMI teams gain better awareness of what is going on across their environments. For many IBMI teams, the challenge is that the system is not unreliable. In fact, IBMI is known for one of the most reliable platforms in the enterprise. The challenge is that when something starts to drift, whether that is CPU, disk, temp storage, job subsystems, message queues, or application activity, teams need visibility early enough to respond before it becomes a business impact issue. That is really the theme for today. Moving from a reactive troubleshooting to proactive operational awareness. Instead of waiting for users to report slowdowns or find out after a job has been stuck for hours or days, or discovering after the fact the storage has grown faster than expected, the goal is to identify the conditions that matter and monitor them consistently. Today we'll talk about where Robot Monitor fits, what types of things you should be watching on your IBMI, and how monitoring can become part of a broader operational workflow, not just another screen to check. Before I hand it over to my colleagues, I want to do a quick show where Robot Monitor fits into the broader portfolio here at Fortra. Robot Monitor is the awareness layer. It helps IBMI teams see key conditions across the environment through dashboards. Being able to see performance, jobs, subsystems, queues, storage, and other operational indicators. When combined with the rest of the robot portfolio, the awareness can feed notifications, automation, centralized operations, visibility, and continuity. The simple message is this. Robot Monitor helps teams move from manually checking systems to managing by exceptions. With that foundation, I'm going to turn it over to Bob and Terry. They'll introduce themselves, walk through the key monitoring areas IBMI teams should be thinking about, and then show how Robot Monitor can help bring those areas into view through the product and the demonstration that they'll be doing. Bob and Terry, it's all yours. Hey, thanks Greg. Quick intro. My name is Bob Butcher. I'm a solutions engineer with Fortra. I've been on the IBMI platform for about 30 years in various roles, system admin, operator. This is a tool that I think you're going to enjoy seeing today. Over to Terry. Hey, thanks Bob. My name is Terry Preston. I'm a solution engineer also here at Fortra. I have been on the IBMI and its predecessors for probably about 40 years, starting out in operations and then coming on over to Fortra. and supporting the robot products. I'm going to turn it back to you, Bob. Thank you. We'll go to the next slide. Why monitoring matters even more in the IBM environments? One of the biggest challenges we hear from IBM customers today, and if you have been watching our marketplace survey for 2025, the skills was the number one this year. And so what I've seen is a lot of people inherit this IBMI platform, people like network people, operators, programmers. And they might not have the same skill set as maybe a seasoned IBM admin. So that's why I think robot monitor can kind of fill some of the gaps here. The other thing that I see is now I still see people calling it the AS400. And you've got a lot of people that are at that retirement age where they're walking out the door with the business knowledge, that tribal knowledge of processes and how things work. So I think that that's why it's even more important to get something like a robot monitor set up to help fill some of that gap. Let's go to the next screen. So key value to the business and IT operations. The value of the monitoring really comes down to four things. It comes down to visibility, faster response, consistency, and confidence. Visibility means the team has a clear operational signal from the environment. Maybe you've got a widget that's flashing saying, hey, something is down or you've exceeded a threshold. Faster response means that they can act before a condition becomes a bigger problem. Maybe now you can be notified when you've got an error. Consistency means every shift, every operator, every admin, we're all looking at the same screens. We're all consistently looking at maybe a CPU monitor or subsystems or things like that. And the confidence, once you get some of these dashboards set up in robot monitor, now you've got the confidence to maybe train newer staff because you're getting more familiar with how robot monitor is monitoring your environment. Let's go to the next page. So what robot monitor is? Robot monitor helps IBMI teams watch the conditions that matter the most so they can spot issues sooner and respond with more confidence. It can help monitor messages, jobs, subsystems, queues, and thresholds. The key is that we're moving away from manual checking and toward proactive monitoring. Instead of waiting for someone to notice something is wrong, robot monitor helps bring to surface the condition early so the team can prioritize the attention, get notified, and take action. What I like about robot monitor is that you can monitor some of the things that I think are critical in your environment. Maybe your CPU. When you type in work status, I'm looking at my temporary storage. You can monitor that automatically in robot monitor. I can monitor my disk. What's the disk percentage in SysBase or IASP? I can look at CPU. Robot monitor, what's great about it, and you'll see it in a demo, is you can start seeing who's eating all of my CPU. Temporary storage, what's eating my disk space? Robot monitor allows you to collect what's eating maybe what's growing in my libraries or my directories. You can monitor critical subsystems running. Are those systems up and running? And you can also put in some thresholds to monitor some of the performance. Because every IBMI environment is different, robot monitor is highly customizable. Teams can define what matters to them. They can set thresholds around your environment and what's normal and abnormal, and generate alerts based on what truly requires attention. What might be important for your environment might not be important for someone else. That's what makes it not just a monitoring tool, but a practical way to reduce operational risk, improve visibility, and help busy IBMI teams stay ahead of issues before they come business problems. We'll go to the next screen. These are just some of the things that you can monitor with robot monitor. There's a lot of things that you can do. Terry's going to go through in the demo and go through a few of these things. But what I like is PTFs. Are all of your systems using the same PTFs? Exception notifications, disk monitoring, ODBC monitoring. These are some of the things. If you are a shop that uses BRMS for your backups, we have some monitoring tools that we can use in there. The other thing that you can do is if you do logical replication, even if it's MIMICS, you can monitor for MIMICS, data groups. Robot HA you can monitor. Are the robot HA jobs running? The other thing you can do is you can also monitor for BIOS and Linux. You can do some monitoring there as well as PowerHA. And in the next part of this presentation, we are going to, with the help of Terry Preston, do a demo. And here we go. Thanks, Bob. So Bob's been talking about how Robot is a real-time performance and critical elements monitor for your systems. It collects your monitored items every 30 seconds. And according to the thresholds you set, it determines how, when, and where to alert you. Whether it's a color change in the columns, such as my JDBC job's running. It can send a message out to a message queue that you can pick up. Or an email can be sent via robot alert. With the system monitor display up, you can view and react quickly to any issues that would appear on your system. But the system display can be pretty busy because you're looking at all of your critical items. That's where dashboards come in. A dashboard is a view of very specific items that you want to be alerted on. This allows you to monitor and pinpoint issues even quicker than you would on the system monitor. This is my storage dashboard here. I've had a few concerns recently about system growth. Some are in some of the larger libraries here. This shows me currently the overall S-storage. It's going to give me a historical view of the systems and even lets me drill down into specific libraries. Since I'm concerned about those libraries, I have a view of the top 10 that I show here. You can see my wisdom system has these 10 libraries. Journal library has been growing quite a bit. It's my largest library. I can actually drill down into JournLib and I can look at its history. This is showing me the history for the month. If I go up here to options, I can even look at my yearly view. I can see that this has been growing pretty consistently. This lets me determine whether I need to do some more research into why this library is growing and get a handle on it. I've created another dashboard. This dashboard is over my three production systems. Academy, Vaughn, and Wisdom. These are the systems I'm most concerned about. You can see here I have a CPU usage going. I'm looking at total jobs on the system. I have some subsystems that I'm very concerned about. They're critical subsystems. I've created a display showing me the status of these subsystems. If they're active, they're going to be green. If they're down, they're red or pink. This allows me to identify quickly which subsystems might be having an issue. I can drill down into any of these objects and see what's going on with them. I can see that I'm spiking some CPU on my system Wisdom. I can either drill down into the CPU here or I can go down to my top ten CPUs. I see there's this job called Big Bad. I can click on this and it's going to take me into that job. From here I can get some general information about the job, where it's running, what program it's doing. I can look at a library list, go into its call stack. I can even go into its job log if I want to determine what's going on. After viewing the job log, I've determined that I want to end this job. I come up to actions. From actions I can change, I can hold, I can release, or I can end this job. I'm going to select end. In here you can select how you want to end it. I'm going to do immediate. Click OK. It's going to require you to sign in because we want to make sure that you're actually authorized to do this process. I've now selected end. This job is going to be ended immediately and will disappear from my top ten CPUs. Back out here we can see that it has gone from being in my top ten. Another cool option with dashboards is you can actually create a slideshow. It will flip through the dashboards that you've created. I can go into file and I can create a dashboard slideshow. I click on dashboard slideshow. I've added these dashboards into my slideshow. I simply do run dashboard slideshow. What it's going to do is it's going to flip through each dashboard. It's going to give you about 10 to 15 seconds on each dashboard. You can view the items as they're going through. If you need to react you can simply click on them and resolve the problem or do some research on the problem. It's an easy way to see what's going on on your systems with very specific dashboards. I've talked a lot about how to view and drill down into your created items and your critical items. I haven't shown you how to add an item into your view or how to modify them. There's a couple different ways to do this. We're going to look at the most common way. From the system monitor view you can click on item selection. Item selection takes you into all the current items that you're available to use on your system for monitoring. We do ship a number of them. They're under the built-in. Let's look at auxiliary storage. If I right-click on that item and go into the properties, I can see the description on what this is going to modify or monitor. I can look at my global thresholds. Here is where I set up how I want to be notified. I'm just going to right-click on this one. I'm going to look at change. In here it tells me what actions it's going to perform when it hits this threshold. It's going to turn my monitor column red. It's going to set it as a warning with an X. I'm going to send a message out to a message queue. I'm going to repeat that message as long as it stays over that threshold. Finally, I'm going to use robot alert to send an email out to my alert device, Chuck. When it hits this threshold, these are the actions it's going to take. You can change these, of course, to match any of your specifications just by coming into properties and changing them. Then you click OK. If you wanted to add a new monitored item, you just click on Monitor Something New. You tell us what you want to monitor and what you want to do when it hits certain thresholds. If you want to see what properties are set up for a specific item you already have in your monitor view, you can always just right-click on that item and you can go into Change. It is going to bring up that data definition for that particular item. You can then go into the global thresholds and you can look and see what's going on with that monitor and how it's going to alert. I hope you've enjoyed this demo of Robot Monitor and see the value that it adds into your monitoring of your systems. Thank you. Thank you, Bob and Terry. Before I wrap up here, I wanted to point out to everyone some additional Robot Monitor resources you can use after today's session. This webinar was intended to give an overview of the product and solution. From here, we have some next steps that you can take here and look at some different videos that we have out here, all the way from quick start videos, common how-tos, and then real-world use cases. As time goes on over the next weeks and months, you're going to see this section on our channel out there get a little bit deeper on some of these different topics as we create the different videos out there. But you do have availability to those. That brings us to the end of today's session. I want to thank everyone for joining us and a special thanks again to Bob and Terry for walking us through the content and the demo. The main takeaway today is proactive monitoring is about giving your team early awareness, better visibility, and more confidence in day-to-day IBMI operations. Robot Monitor can help you move from that manual checking and reactive troubleshooting towards a more consistent exception-based approach. If you have any questions after today, feel free to reach out to your Fortra team here and contact us. We can go through a more extensive demo if you'd like to on some of your different use cases. But again, thanks again for your time. We appreciate the opportunity and hope to talk to you soon. Thank you.
