Our MVS Agent, STARS, allows you to improve the effectiveness of your operations staff, today. How? MVS systems have always sent too many messages to operators. To help operators manage and respond to important messages IBM created a feature called Message Processing Facility or MPF. This facility allows MVS system support staffs to change color, suppress or otherwise give special treatment to MVS messages, by message number.

The problem with this approach is the shear number of messages and the fact that new ones are constantly being added. STARS takes a more practical approach. MVS software already identifies important messages when they create the message. As soon as STARS is installed and running, it sends notifications of important messages to designated managers anywhere on your network.

This allows operations staffs to stop staring at the green tube and respond only to important alerts displayed by the managers. Managers supported include World Solutions Corp.'s Virtual Command Center, MCC; Hewlett-Packard's Open View™; and BMC's Patrol Enterprise Manager, PEM™.

STARS installs in under an hour on MVS. Initially it can run as a batch job. Once started notifications are sent to managers on your network for any message identified by your software as important, i.e. requiring operator action.

STARS comes with robust filtering capabilities. If some special messages, flagged as operator action required, should be ignored, operations staff can easily add messages to STARS' filter list and ignore the message. For example, many sites have remote printer packages that notify operations when remote printers need to be refilled with paper. This message is a prime candidate for an action message that should be ignored. Other sites run important applications such as CICS. Even though the notification message that CICS has ended, is not considered important by MVS software, it probably is critical. Again the STARS filter list can be modified to send this message to its managers.

If MCC is used as your manager, it will begin receiving notifications. Using MCC's GCL scripting capabilities, these messages are displayed on MCC's Alert Window.

The GCL scripting language is designed for use by non-programmer operations personnel. In our experience, operations staff usually begin modifying the STARS GCL exit script to route messages to specific groups of users, such as tape operators; change the default alert colors; ring bells, etc.

Try STARS, and see how quickly you can increase your operations staff's productiveness. Start with just action messages and let your operators take charge of what they see.