MessengerPlus Keeps Shell Canada's Unstaffed Operations Flowing
Shifting from a diverse mainframe operation to an integrated ERP solution on the AS/400 platform in 1995 enabled Shell Canada Ltd. to trim all but four of its former 27-member MVS technical support positions.
John Thiers, senior staff systems analyst, in charge of communications software, was part of the team that set up the "lights-out" unstaffed installation. Now encompassing four large AS/400s with seven L-PARs (logical partitions), the installation in Calgary performs vital financial functions for the corporation's offices coast to coast. Thiers initially monitored systems operation remotely using IBM's PagerPac/400 software, which he soon found too primitive. "PagerPac could only monitor message queues. It did not have job queue monitoring, ping monitoring, outqueues, backups, or ability to send e-mails." As the seven members of the growing technical support team and the company's 70 applications support technicians became increasingly reliant on alert notification, Thiers searched for a better monitoring utility.
The Solution
After evaluating available products, Thiers selected Bytware's MessengerPlus, a fully integrated iSeries and eServer i5 monitoring and messaging utility with sophisticated notification and reporting features. MessengerPlus responds to critical events by sending alert messages to pagers, telephones or e-mail addresses, or automatically taking corrective action-whichever the user designates. Thiers was impressed from the outset by the ease of installation. "The longest portion of the install was the two-block walk from my office to the computer room. The actual installation took 20 minutes, and the transition from PagerPac was very easy, " said Thiers.
MessengerPlus warns Thiers and his colleagues of disk failures, communication network interruptions, job processing errors and other problems. He says it routinely prevents potential system crashes by monitoring for hardware and software alerts, excessive CPU utilization by any user, and queries that generate overwhelmingly large temporary disk use. MessengerPlus checks overall storage utilization by tapping into the AS/400's auxiliary storage pool threshold setting and triggering messages to the operator's message queue whenever storage utilization exceeds 80 percent of disk space.
MessengerPlus also monitors about 30,000 batch jobs each month and notifies the applications support teams of job failures or intervention requirements, a function normally performed by an operations crew.
Thiers and his colleagues use the MessengerPlus ping monitor function to track traffic between machines and identify network interruptions. They've configured it to alert them if more than 15 jobs are waiting to execute in a particularly critical job queue, allowing them to move some to a different job queue. In all, Thiers and his colleagues receive 600 to 1,500 pages per month from MessengerPlus, which transmits specific messages to their alpha-numeric pagers, cell phones and e-mail accounts.
"In response to a page, we've sprinted the two blocks to the computer operation in the middle of winter, when it's 40 below. We don't like doing that often," laughs Thiers. That's why he and his staff value the "auto replies" function enabling automation of actions, including the ability of MessengerPlus to execute corrective CL commands. "MessengerPlus is feature-rich. It's the best product on the market," Thiers declares.
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Resource Details
Type: Case Study
Product: MessengerPlus
Customer: Shell Canada
Summary
MessengerPlus helps keeps systems running smoothly as the transition to a "lights-out" unstaffed operation trims the IT staff from 27 to just four.
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