> Please do not laugh. Ok. My lips are contorted into a strange shape like a chortle in progress, but I swear I am not laughing. Well, ok, maybe just a little.
> My management is asking me how much overhead is consumed by z/OS for > processing the SMF records. I have no idea. Has anyone ever researched > this and can share some info on it. I'll bite. "Overhead" is presumably the aggregate of costs over and above the "value" of the thing being done. If the thing being done is more valuable than the cost of doing it then the "overhead" is nil. Attribution of value is left as an exercise for the reader :-) The cost of collecting, writing and (post) processing SMF records is hard to quantify. Most records are created in memory by various parts of the system whether you are actually collecting them or not. So that aspect of the cost is always present and impossible to discern from the background noise level within the system. The cost of writing the SMF records is pretty low. You can get a back of the envelope estimate of that by checking the resource consumption of the SMF address space, which is what does all of the actual SMF I/O. Don't forget to add in the cost of the periodic IFASMDFP jobs that copy the SMF data from the SYS1.MANx datasets to GDGs or whatever technique you use. IBM is working on lowering those costs over the next couple of releases. But they're pretty low now in the great scheme of things. The cost of actually post-processing all of those jillions of SMF records to produce useful information, accounting, charge-back, planning data or whatever can be very significant. Most shops I see spend a lot of overnight batch resources bashing though SMF with SORT to sort/merge and run various reports. That definitely costs resources, but the cost of not doing it may be worse in the long run. There are always trade-offs to be made between the processing cost of function X and the business value derived from X. Did they have any particular problem in mind or was this another rock-fetch exercise from a freshly minted manager? The question for management is "what problem are you trying to solve and what would you have us do differently?" CC ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
