On Fri, 29 Dec 2023 13:57:35 -0600, Mark Zelden <m...@mzelden.com> wrote:

>On Thu, 28 Dec 2023 21:23:18 -0800, Ed Jaffe <edja...@phoenixsoftware.com> 
>wrote:
>
>>What SMF interval do most folks use?
>>
>
>In my experience (from many shops / clients over the years), it matches the 
>RMF interval
>and the most common if 15 minutes.  Second most common is probably 30 (along 
>with
>RMF) but I think most shops moved away from that to go to at least 15 years 
>ago. I have
>seen some use 5 minutes and sometimes IBM will request that for a period of 
>time - perhaps
>for a week to get a more accurate picture for a CP3000 study.   
>
>This is typically what I use in SMFPRMxx:
>
>INTVAL(15)             
>SYNCVAL(59)            
>

You didn't way why you wanted to know.  But thinking about this more... I 
though i remembered
Cheryl Watson doing a poll on this once.  I searched her website and saw in 
2008 there was a 3 
part series on SMF / parms and she asked people to send in their parms, but I 
didn't see a follow
up on the results.  She did recommend setting INTVAL(30) and said using 
SYNCVAL(59) was no
longer required and to use SYNCVAL(0). I won't go into the history for why 
people 
started coded SYNVCAL(59) to begin with (she does).  Maybe someone on team 
Cheryl does
have poll results from back then or more recently. 

However she also recommended changing RMF invterval from 15 to 30 to match SMF 
INTVAL (she
previously suggested using RMF interval of 15, SMF INTVAL(30). Partially due to 
the number of 
SMF/RMF Type 74 records from DASD activity from the size of systems at the 
time.  That to me 
makes no sense because even though there is more RMF data to store and process, 
the CPUs 
are much faster, the disk & I/O is much faster and storage is "cheaper", so 
it's all relative. 
I know I'm talking RMF interval now as opposed to your question on SMF INTVAL, 
but 30
minutes is just not granular enough in the large installations I have worked 
in.  Be it for
typical performance report & capacity planning or looking at WLM reports 
(although I use
RMF III or Mainview CMF more for WLM tuning that post processing).  Even in 
small
environments I have always used 15 for both SMF and RMF/CMF.    

Back to your question: While I have mostly seen 15 minutes to match RMF / CMF 
15 minutes,
in my personal experiences, 30 minutes is the default and lot of people listen 
to Cheryl's 
advise (because it is good), so without any scientific polling, I'm sure that 
it is still very
common to see INTVAL(30).    I just don't agree and have never used anything 
higher
than 15.  

This paper from Scott Chapman of EPS talks about the subject and he agrees with
me that it should be no longer than 15 minutes and that RMF/SMF should be 
synced.  

https://www.pivotor.com/library/content/Chapman_SMFRecommendations_2022.pdf


Best Regards,

Mark
--
Mark Zelden - Zelden Consulting Services - z/OS, OS/390 and MVS
ITIL v3 Foundation Certified
mailto:m...@mzelden.com
Mark's MVS Utilities: http://www.mzelden.com/mvsutil.html

----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN

Reply via email to