Hi, We write SMF to logstreams. Every day at midnight we copy the data for the previous day to dasd. Every week we create a weekly smf dataset from the previous weeks daily datasets.
Gadi -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Ron Burg Sent: Wednesday, February 10, 2021 12:33 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Collecting SMF data with Logstreams Hello, I'm trying to figure out the best-practice for collecting SMF data with Logstream instead of MAN datasets. There are few points I seem to miss and I hope to get some advice from those who used it for a while. I can see the benefits in storing the SMF on logstream only, for example I can use IFASMFDL to set range of dates and not have to worry about the location of each week/month in a different GDG generation. Also, the ability of logger to use the timestamp to read only relevant period can save time and CPU while offloading data in comparison to sequential read. Those benefit however are minified if I use the logstream only as a short-term storage before migrating the data to the regular GDG datasets. Here are some open questions I have: 1. The ideal situation for me would be to have all SMF data on logstream, for example for a period of two years, but there is a limit of 168 offload datasets before starting to use DSEXTENTs and each dataset can be up to about 2GB in size, this makes me wonder if I misunderstood the Logstream usage as a long term storage of smf data. Does it make sense to hold SMF data for few years on logstream? 2. Using the IFASMFDL utility is very tricky as I can get RC 4 for both "RELATIVEDATE RANGE EXTENDS INTO FUTURE" and for a case where I ran the job on a different system (DASD-only logstream) and it failed to find the logstream. Worse than that, if I try to dump data from few offload datasets (a week for example) and one of the "middle" datasets is missing I can get a return code of 0 while the data returned will be only what Logger was able to find. How can I be sure that the dumped data from IFASMFDL is complete? By the way, I used the "SMF Logstream Mode" redbook which was very useful but it left me with those unanswered questions. Many thanks for helping, Ron Burg ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN Email secured by Check Point ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
