A screen a story – PM400 and the day after (30th September 2020)

The term “IBM Performance Management for Power Systems” does most likely not immediately ring a bell, my guess is “PM400” does. It was offered for free and as a Dutchman, after I hear the word “free”, you have my attention.

PM400 was a service offered by IBM for free, performance reports accessible from a Website and on paper, if you wanted more functionality, that came with a fee. After installation of a system, in QSYSOPR you could find a message asking you if you wanted to activate PM400 yes or no. I do not recall the exact message, but that does not matter anymore, because IBM did sunset this offering on 30^th September of last year.

If you did activate PM400, there is some work to do, if you want to keep your IBM i LPAR nice and tidy. You need to do some tidying up, to make your screen look like the one below:

Part of the HTTP PTF group is Navigator for i, in it’s turn PDI is part of Navigator for i. It was in document “PDI Details on changes shipped in PTFs” where I found the link to instructions “turn off PM agent”. As always when having to do things manually you as a system administrator think, can this be done cleverer?

It starts with the challenge that you have to do part of what needs to be done Interactively. In order to check how to get around this I decided to run the command “CFGPM400” manually in 5250 emulation, but before doing so, I started an SQL script and ran the command shown below:

CL:STRAUTCOL USRPRF(RUDI) LIBINF(*ALL);

After running the command in the 5250 session, I ran the command shown below followed by a select statement:

CL:ENDAUTCOL USRPRF(RUDI) LIBINF(*ALL);  

SELECT * FROM QSYS2.AUTHORITY_COLLECTION                                                   

WHERE USER_NAME = ‘RUDI’ and DATE(CHECK_TIMESTAMP)=CURRENT DATE order by CHECK_TIMESTAMP;

In this way I found the *DTAARA behind the CFGPM400 command: Q1PCTL in QUSRSYS. Some more trial & error showed that the last 3 positions in that *DTAARA are used to control the settings for “Do not send performance data” and “Receive performance data”, which both need to be set to “0”.  The command below does set those 3 position to return a value of “0” when entering the command in a 5250 session:

CHGDTAARA DTAARA(QUSRSYS/Q1PCTL (98 3)) VALUE(‘   ‘)

Doing this was not without any risk, but I made the decision to share this information, just to show how Authority Collection can be used and, in some cases, not bring you the answer you are after.

I did use authority collection also to find where the information of the option “Work with Automatically Scheduled Jobs” was stored. In this case Authority Collection lead me to the file QA1PSC in QUSRSYS. The SQL statement below does what step 5 to 9 tell you to do manually in one go:

update qusrsys.QA1PSC set SCSTAT = ‘I’

So the summary of deactivating PM400 in an SQL script looks as shown below:

–The statements below is to be executed at your own risk

CL:CHGDTAARA DTAARA(QUSRSYS/Q1PCTL (98 3)) VALUE(‘   ‘);

–None: The parameter value does contain three spaces

update qusrsys.QA1PSC set SCSTAT = ‘I’;

–Remove the Q1PSCH Job

CL:CALL PGM(QSYS/Q1PENDPM) PARM(‘*IMMED ‘ X’999999′ X’00000000’);
–Note: There must be four spaces after *IMMED and one space before each X

–To remove the QPM400 autostart job entry now

CL:RMVAJE SBSD(QSYS/QSYSWRK) JOB(QPM400);

Something which is not documented, is cleaning up a leftover of PM400:

CL:RMVCMNE SBSD(QCMN) RMTLOCNAME(QP1LOC) MODE(Q1PMOD);

CL:DLTMODD MODD(Q1PMOD)

After you are done and maybe after an IPL you can check if your clean-up was successful, by starting a 5250 session and running the command GO PM400. Option 6 “Display PM Agent Status” should tell you that the PM400 Agent scheduler has the status “Inactive”.

If you have only a few LPAR’s to manage I always play things by the book, as IBM suggest you to do. If you have a very large number of LPAR’s, it might be worthwhile to try something which does speed things up. The risk to do so needs to be carefully considered, in the end it is you who has to make the right decision.

Whatever the outcome of that LPAR review, I think by now you will realise that IBM’s decision to sunset PM400 service does mean a little extra work for you if you want to keep your system tidy and in most cases, that extra work, consists of one final task, which is to stop  the now redundant PM400 activity on your LPAR.