P-Tracker – z/OS Software Asset Discovery

Software budget now far exceeds the hardware budget in most sites and will continue to increase dramatically. This is driven by continued decrease in the price of MIPS and the increasing demand for mainframe resources. Managers in charge of budgets need to be creative on how they deal with the contract negotiations. The only way to be truly assertive is with accurate information on software usage.

Procurement specialists and z/OS IT managers trying to reduce software costs must find out which products their users are using:

• What software product is really used?
• Who is using it? Where the software executes?
• When is the product used?
• How often the software is used?

When it is time to renegotiate annual software licences, most sites blindly renew their contract because they do not have an accurate inventory of the programs really used.

Procurement and z/OS Managers considering software cutbacks need to find which programs and products their users are really using. P-Tracker is a software monitoring tool for z/OS that tells you which software products have been actually accessed, from which library and by whom.

The main objective of P-Tracker is to reduce your mainframe software costs.

Features

Continuously monitoring numerous Db2 subsystems is time consuming for aDBA or even several DBA. Valuable DBA time can be saved because all required ALTER statements for tuning the systems are automatically generated. BDA4DB2 Process

• Detect software products no longer used, so you can cancel the software licence
• Identify rarely used products; perhaps an alternate solution could meet the needs
• Help find and remove unlicensed software in some systems

P-Tracker Architecture

P-Tracker is the only independent tool for z/OS that monitors the usage of software programs and detects modules that are rarely or no longer used. P-Tracker monitors Batch programs and programs running under CICS or other z/OS subsystems. It records the module name and the name of the load library from which the module was loaded from.

P-Tracker processing involves two steps: The Collector and the Post-Processing tasks.

The Collector is a system monitor that efficiently captures the information using SAF exits. To reduce the amount of data captured, P-Tracker provides advanced exclusion mechanism. This avoids monitoring core z/OS modules or other third parties or in-house systems. The collected information is temporary copied into a data space before being written to a sequential dataset or to Db2 tables. The P-Tracker collection method ensures a minimum impact on system performances.

The Post-Processing tasks process the information captured by the Collector. Cryptic program names are automatically matched to corresponding applications names and product identification using LIAM knowledge base (Licence & Internal Software Asset Management). LIAM contains information about programs name and libraries names that make up a particular application or product.

Most asset managers are not really interested to know about the modules name within a product, or the list of programs within each product. They prefer to focus on the utilization and the usage frequently of used these products. P-Tracker’s design ensures that identified modules always match product names and its specific version number.

P-Tracker automatically produces numerous detailed reports on product usage. The collected data can be exported in CSV file, in flat files with predefined field formats or it can be inserted into Db2 tables. Other reports can be quickly developed using your own report generator program.

Program Sequencer

Another real benefit of P-Tracker is a view of call sequences of programs within a call tree and within applications. This is a valuable tool for the development team to allow them to see which program is used within applications.

Modules Inventory

Programs Never Used P-Tracker can maintain a table of “Called Modules". This table indicates how often a module was called since P-Tracker was activated. A difference between this table and the name of modules inside the load-libraries show the list of unused modules.

The P-Tracker report for "Never Used Modules" is a good indication of the modules that can be removed from production libraries.

Key Features

• Report usage about commercial software (ISV) and in-house applications
• Detect and reports on every job or user using application
• Highlight unused or infrequent used applications
• Filter on Time, Date, LPAR, Volume, Library and Application
• Reveal duplicate modules and sequence of internal program calls

Benefits

P-Tracker is the only independent tool for z/OS that monitors programs usage. You can easily determine whether specific program families are used or not.

P-Tracker identifies the users that need to be contacted when you decide to change or drop a software licence. It empowers you to cancel software licences that are no longer cost-justified.

• Drop costly licence of unused or redundant products
• Negotiate much more effectively with software Vendors
• Help contract renegotiations based on true usage rather than perceived usage
• Reassign human resources that are maintaining obsolete programs

If your job is to reduce mainframe software costs, then P-Tracker provides all the information about the current product usage. P-Tracker automatically detects and identifies software products installed, but not used. You could cancel maintenance and stop supporting them. Users of infrequently used products could migrate to a lower-cost alternative that could still meet their needs.

To obtain more information about P-Tracker or any of our solutions, please contact us.

Contact us

For more information on P-Tracker, please fill our contact form or send us an email.