Processing SMF records with SORT.

[Ranveer Singh]

Hi,

We need to make a report using SMF to get the accounting informtion for DB2 and IMS. Ours is an IMS dominated company and DB2 usage is approtioned in IMS CPU usage. What is the tool should we use for accessing SMF records? Will SORT be a goof tool for this?

[Robert Sample]

SORT is not really a very good tool for dealing with SMF data. SMF has many triplets (a 4-byte offset into the record, a 2-byte length of the segment, and a 2-byte count of segment occurrences) defining various segments within the records. SORT does not have any way of dealing with the segments.

If your site has MXG, that is a really good tool for handling SMF data. However, MXG does require SAS be installed so if your site doesn't have SAS you're not going to be able to use MXG. There are various products available to process SMF records; I STRONGLY recommend your site look at the market and pick one of these instead of attempting to write your own. SMF records are not always easy to decode and there are many bit flags used; some field values may not be present depending upon the bit flags in that record. I've been working on a COBOL program to read and display SMF data for several years; the program is about 60% complete and is currently about 75,000 lines with comments included.