ADVANCED VISUALISATION ON MAINFRAME

RMF AND SMF DATA

(APPLYING BIG DATA SOLUTIONS TO IT SYSTEM UTILISATION DATA)

ANDREW GADSBY, MAINFRAME BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

andrew.gadsby@sas.com
MIKE WROOT, MAINFRAME TECHNICAL SPECIALIST
michael.wroot@sas.com

C opy r i ght 2012, SAS I nsti tute I nc . All r i ghts r eser ved.

ABSTRACT

ANDREW GADSBY and MIKE WROOT

Title:
Advanced Visualisation and Analytics on Mainframe RMF and SMF Data
(Applying Big Data techniques to IT system utilisation data)
Abstract:
Much has been written about applying analytics to Big Data problems and how advanced visualisation techniques allow
businesses to create new value from Big Data. At SAS we are seeing many customer facing organisations make
extensive use of new visualisation techniques to derive significant business value from the mass of data available to
them.
IT also suffers from its own Big Data problem with the 4 Vs (volume, velocity, variety and variability) applying to IT
systems performance and capacity data. We wondered if it would be possible to apply Big Data visualisation and
analytic techniques to mainframe RMF and SMF data. In particular, we wanted to understand if analysis in this way
could deliver value back into IT.
This session will present an overview of the approach we took to analyse and visualise this data, and illustrate some of
the value that could be derived from such analysis. We will also give a live demonstration of our solution.

C opy r i ght 2012, SAS I nsti tute I nc . All r i ghts r eser ved.

AGENDA

ADVANCED VISUALISATION

Introductions
How are Your Business Users Looking at their Data?

Demonstration

How does IT undertake capacity reporting today?

Linking Visualisation to Capacity Reporting and Forecasting

Demonstration

Observations and Conclusion

C opy r i ght 2012, SAS I nsti tute I nc . All r i ghts r eser ved.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

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FROM THE MAGIC CIRCLE.

AGENDA

ADVANCED VISUALISATION

Introductions
How are Your Business Users Looking at their Data?

Demonstration

How does IT undertake capacity reporting today?

Linking Visualisation to Capacity Reporting and Forecasting

Demonstration

Observations and Conclusion

C opy r i ght 2012, SAS I nsti tute I nc . All r i ghts r eser ved.

The Greatest Value Of A Picture

Is When It Forces Us To Notice
What We Never Expected To See.
John W. Tukey, Exploratory Data Analysis 1977

C opy r i ght 2012, SAS I nsti tute I nc . All r i ghts r eser ved.

BUSINESS USERS
VIEW

Visually Exploring Their Data Using Tablets

User Self Service is Becoming the Norm
Speed of Thought Investigation and Discovery
Building Analytical Data Warehouses (ADW)
Improved Decision Taking Across the Business

Static Reports are No Longer Acceptable

C opy r i ght 2012, SAS I nsti tute I nc . All r i ghts r eser ved.

VISUALISATION OF BIG DATA

SAS VISUAL
ANALYTICS

A SOLUTION FOR FASTER, SMARTER DECISIONS

Central Entry Point

PREPARE
Manage data
Load and join data
Create calculated
columns

Integration

EXPLORE
Perform ad-hoc data
exploration
Insights generated
through analytic
visualizations

Role-Based Views

DESIGN
Create dashboard style
reports for web or
mobile

IN-MEMORY ANALYTICS ENGINE

C opy r i ght 2012, SAS I nsti tute I nc . All r i ghts r eser ved.

www.sas.com/visualanalytics

DELIVER

SAS Mobile BI - native

tablet applications
delivering interactive
reports
Web and PDF

DEMONSTRATION
SAS VISUAL ANALYTICS

MEGACORP

C opy r i ght 2012, SAS I nsti tute I nc . All r i ghts r eser ved.

AGENDA

ADVANCED VISUALISATION

Introductions
How are Your Business Users Looking at their Data?

Demonstration

How does IT undertake capacity reporting today?

Linking Visualisation to Capacity Reporting and Forecasting

Demonstration

Observations and Conclusion

C opy r i ght 2012, SAS I nsti tute I nc . All r i ghts r eser ved.

HOW I.T. LOOKS AT

PERFORMANCE
DATA

VISUALISATION OF I.T. DATA

Mainframe e.g. MXG, MICS using SMF and RMF data

Distributed e.g. SAR, NMON
Static Reports - GIFs
Export to Excel

C opy r i ght 2012, SAS I nsti tute I nc . All r i ghts r eser ved.

AGENDA

ADVANCED VISUALISATION

Introductions
How are Your Business Users Looking at their Data?

Demonstration

How does IT undertake capacity reporting today?

Linking Visualisation to Capacity Reporting and Forecasting

Demonstration

Observations and Conclusion

C opy r i ght 2012, SAS I nsti tute I nc . All r i ghts r eser ved.

LINKING
VISUALISATION TO
I.T. DATA

EXAMPLE HIGH-LEVEL ARCHITECTURE

SAS VISUAL ANALYTICS ENVIRONMENT
LASR Cluster

SMF/RMF

SAS LASR Analytic

Server

VA Server

SAS VA CLIENTS

Mid-Tier

Desktop
Web

SAR

OpenView

AWR

C opy r i ght 2012, SAS I nsti tute I nc . All r i ghts r eser ved.

Co-Located Data
Storage

Workspace Server

Mobile

DEMONSTRATION
SAS VISUAL ANALYTICS FOR I.T.

MEGACORP I.T.

C opy r i ght 2012, SAS I nsti tute I nc . All r i ghts r eser ved.

OBSERVATIONS &
CONCLUSIONS

VISUALISATION OF I.T. DATA

Loading and Visualisation of the underlying data was the easy bit
Understanding what the data means is critical

Just because you can view things a certain way doesnt mean it makes sense!
Good news here as a capacity planning expert you will still keep your job

Correlation is hard
Drill down from CPU utilisation at point of time to recreate workload/job step view
is difficult
Resolving this needs effort at data preparation / load time

Changes way that capacity planning and forecasting is approached

Could drive significant reduction in static report production on mainframe (CPU saving ? )

We are Continuing Development of this Technology and Use Case

C opy r i ght 2012, SAS I nsti tute I nc . All r i ghts r eser ved.

QUESTIONS?

THANK YOU

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