What are some common MVS performance tuning tools and techniques that you recommend?

Tools: 1. RMF (Resource Measurement Facility): Monitors system resources and identifies bottlenecks. 2. SDSF (System Display and Search Facility): Manages job output and system activity. 3. Omegamon: Comprehensive tool for monitoring and managing performance. 4. CA SYSVIEW: Real-time performance insights and resource utilization. ### Techniques: 1. Workload Management (WLM): Efficiently allocate system resources. 2. CPU Utilization: Monitor and balance CPU usage. 3. Memory Management: Optimize memory use and address leaks. 4. Disk I/O Optimization: Improve performance with data striping and caching. These tools and techniques help in effectively monitoring and optimizing MVS system performance.

ABEND-AID is a comprehensive mainframe debugging and diagnostic tool developed by Compuware (not IBM!). One of the most impressive features of ABEND-AID is its ability to facilitate root cause analysis. The tool doesn't just stop at identifying that an error occurred; it goes further to pinpoint the exact cause of the failure. From my experience, ABEND-AID has consistently identified the line of code, data variables, and conditions that led to the abend. This level of detail has enabled me to quickly understand the issue and implement a fix, drastically reducing the time needed to resolve complex problems

We have used the Storage Management Reports from Omegamon to track Volume utilization be dataset high level qualifiers, which identifies the applications that create them. Dataset Activity: Tracks the activity of datasets, identifying frequently accessed datasets and potential candidates for optimization. Volume Utilization: Reports on the usage of storage volumes, helping to balance the load across different storage devices.

Mainview helped me achieve average gains of 30% in COBOL CICS online transactions with DB2 and VSAM handling, through the following strategy: a) Identification of bottlenecks: Monitor transactions with high response times or high resource consumption. From there, perform detailed transaction analysis to identify inefficient code, database access issues, or contention issues. B. Tuning and optimization: After these analyzes it was possible to optimize the COBOL code by improving the logic, reducing unnecessary accesses, improving SQL query logic, and optimizing I/O operations, thus allowing better performance.

Let's take note of Strobe. It is a performance analysis and tuning tool specifically designed for mainframe environments. Strobe can measure the performance of COBOL, PL/I, Assembler, and other languages running on the Mainframe. It can tracks CPU, memory, and I/O usage, generates detailed performance reports that highlight inefficiencies. And it's possible to localize inneficient code exactly where it occurs.