PowerTech Compliance Monitor v3.0 ushers in the next generation of advanced audit reporting for IBM i.

Written by Robin Tatam

Audits are a way of life in today's regulated world. Whether it's Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), the Payment Card Industry (PCI), or the multitude of other government and industry standards, few organizations escape the reach of one or more of these regulations. Unfortunately, there are few things that drive fear into the heart of IT personnel more than the arrival of an auditor: "What are they going to ask to see?" "Do I have to explain what *JOBCTL means again?" "How can I get all my normal work done when I have to figure out how to report on the very information that will be used to penalize me?"

Your options have been pretty limited…until now!

Written by Mike Savino

If you work in a large shop, you probably have hundreds of scheduled batch jobs that run throughout the month. And if you're lucky enough to be using a third-party scheduling tool, you might have canned reports and the ability to query the underlying data in ways that make it easy to figure out who's running the job, when it runs, and what command or program it executes.

Get ready for your 2011 development projects.

Written by Floyd Del Muro

Remember the "good old days" when all we had to worry about was a simple "new-century problem" known as Y2K? Many companies rolled up their sleeves, dug in, and handled that project with fixes: rebuilding, recompiling, and re?creating code.

How do you monitor the IFS and temporary storage growth?

Written by Tom Huntington

You know the all-too?familiar cry from your staff: "Where did the disk space go? Who is responsible for consuming the entire disk?" As a good administrator, you rerun the reports from the past weekend, but you can't find the reason. The library disk reports show that the disk space is the same, yet your WRKSYSSTS disk space percentage is at 92 percent. The culprit may be IFS growth or temporary storage consumption.

Don't let improperly managed deleted records slow down system performance.

Written by Sandra Cabral

When records are deleted or marked for deletion, they may remain as part of the physical file. It is a good practice to run the RGZPFM command to remove deleted records and free up DASD. Removing deleted records can improve performance of programs that read a file sequentially. It can also help reduce the paging of data in from DASD to memory. The recommendation is to run RGZPFM if the number of deleted records exceeds 20 percent of the total number of records in the file.

Searching through IT logs can be boring and tedious. With the swatch (Simple WATCHer) Linux utility, automate actions based on matching logging conditions.

Written by Max Hetrick

Awhile back, I showed you how to take advantage of setting up a centralized remote logging facility for Linux. Centralized logging gives you one location to head for when trouble arises. Using the Linux tool swatch, let's take logging one step further by automating alerts or actions based on conditions matching regular expressions.

CPF1240/CPF1241: Job ended abnormally/normally.

Written by Tom Huntington

Who hasn't had a "file full" message in QSYSOPR? It's about as common as a cold. But what do you do with the message? Always the same reaction? What about the QSYSOPR job end abnormally and normally messages, CPF1240 and CPF1241? They're nice to know for certain jobs, but for most jobs, you don't care. When a certain job ends, do you want to execute a command, restart the job, notify someone, or do something else?

Tired of manually filling out the audit log?

Written by Tom Huntington

Do you spend time each day filling out logs to prove to auditors that you have looked at a system report? Do you spend time entering details into a spreadsheet about reports you reviewed? Do you file these reports and then have trouble retrieving them?