2013-11: FREE DB2 HealthCheck

 

This month, as a thank you to everyone on the News from the Labs “nice” list, we have a seasonal freebie!

Our DB2 HealthCheck package pinpoints weaknesses and opportunities for improvements and optimization in DB2 z/OS systems.
Just click this link, fill in and select “Healthcheck Freeware” down the page.
My support colleagues will ship our Licensed Freeware edition of our HealthCheck series or DB2 z/OS.

 

PerformanceHealthCheck for DB2 z/OS (PHC)

PerformanceHealthCheck for DB2 z/OS (PHC) checks your DB2 subsystem for a range of problems and lists out what it finds including the latest enhancement – the Coupling Facility checker.

I read on listserv about people with “Coupling Facilities under stress” and so I added some CF checks. It checks the six important values in your CF. The Level of the microcode, the transfer time, the number of rejects, the false contention percentage, the subchannel busy percentage and finally the all paths busy count. From these KPIs you can see if your CF is “under stress” or not! Now to get all this juicy data the LOAD library *must* be APF authorized of course!

Remember that the normal Performance HealthCheck still runs fine without being APF auth’d just the CF check must be.

 

Statistics HealthCheck for DB2 z/OS (SHC)

Along with PHC comes Statistics HealthCheck for DB2 z/OS (SHC), which lots of you may already be familiar with. It allows you to analyze and assess a complete DB2 subsystem down to a single database and tell you what is ʺwrongʺ or inconsistent with your DB2 catalog statistics.

This enables you to determine any problems before they get bad and to improve performance by providing the DB2 Optimizer with better information from which it can base its cost estimate on. It fully supports and is compliant for DB2 10. It is a perennial favorite and you cannot run it enough. Especially when you’re going to migrate to a new DB2 version, this software is a must to protect yourself from strange optimizer behavior.

 

The binaries come with the products documentation with a full feature overview that summarizes what our PHC can do for you!
As usual any  questions or comments are welcome,
TTFN Roy Boxwell
Senior Software Architect