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Overview of New Navigator for i

September 8, 2021 by Terry Bartlett 5 Comments

The NEW Navigator for i is a great improvement on the present Navigator.  It is modern (just look at the screen shots), responsive (3 seconds vs 10 seconds), and fairly comprehensive (Active Job columns 126 vs 31).

Click the icon top left (looks like a stack of books) and you get a list view.  Notice the icon changes to squares to take you back to the dashboard view

The four menus are ‘Custom Charts’, ‘Add New Node’, ‘About’ and ‘Serviceability’.  There is a default Custom Chart which opens in a new browser tab.  The refresh rate defaults to 2 minutes.  You can add new charts using SQL statements.  You can have multiple numeric results for a single node or a single numeric result for multiple nodes.

Add New Nwwode is the equivalent of Add Target System, if you have more than one partition.  Once you have double clicked or right click and choose Manage Node, the node name shows in the top bar and on returning to the node dashboard, the current node will be highlighted.  The symbol next to Active, on the right, shows Navigator is using a secure connection.

‘About’ shows a summary of licensed programs and PTFs required for New Navigator and ‘Serviceability’ contains some configuration and logs.

Choose your node and the screen changes completely.

The icons are Home, Work Management, Configuration and Service, System, Monitors, My Work, Network, Security, Users and Groups, Performance, Files System, Bookmarks and Serviceability.  The X at the bottom has text ‘View IBM Navigator for i alerts’ and shows QSYSOPR messages.  In addition, there is a small grey arrow at the bottom of the screen which shows a list of nodes when hovered or remains if clicked.

There are many similarities between the 2 versions.  Nearly all the screens have an Actions button at the top, like present Navigator.  instead of the options changing with context they are greyed out if not applicable.  In lists many lines can be selected, but the whole line is highlighted, there is a count at the bottom and there are ‘Select all’ and ‘Deselect all’ options in ‘Actions’.

There are many improvements.  For instance, under ‘My Work’, while ‘My Messages’ and ‘My Printer Output’ are the same, ‘My Jobs’ now show 23 server jobs, whereas the present Navigator show no jobs until I add a 5250 job.  New options are ‘My Objects’ and ‘My IFS Objects’.

Finally, I personally really like the new Performance screens, there are 470 different screens to choose from.  Here is a taster.

There is so much more to cover in New Nav4i , so watch out for more articles on this great new interface.

Here are some links to IBM documentation

Custom Charts

Performance Data Investigator in Navigator for i

Managing Multiple IBM i Endpoint Nodes

Access Authorization Options

Product Install Requirements

PTF Information

Service Availability (Troubleshooting)

i-UG next event is In Person Only and will be held at The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park on the 7th October.  Number are seriously being limited and I suspect it will be a sold out soon so act now.  For more details check out  www.i-ug.co.uk

Filed Under: IBM i, News, Technical Articles Tagged With: IBM i, IBM i System Information, IBM Power Systems, New Nav4i, New Navigator for i

Comments

  1. Eddie Chaffin says

    September 9, 2021 at 9:26 am

    Looks amazing – how do we get it ?

    Reply
  2. Steve Munday says

    September 9, 2021 at 12:46 pm

    Terry,

    Thanks for sharing details of the new iNav interface.

    Keen to give it a go I went off to Fix Central to get the required PTFs. Unfortunately “right now” SF99662 remains at level 12 (https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/6486565 shows 13 is needed) and the SI76981 PTF has yet to be released by IBM (I opened a Case as my URL was erroring out).

    IBM say the individual PTF will be available soon fist as a “test” PTF.

    All the best, Steve

    Reply
  3. Steve Munday says

    September 9, 2021 at 2:07 pm

    Terry,

    Hi, IBM have confirmed the individual PTF will be made available at the end of September.

    Many thanks, Steve

    Reply
  4. Terry Bartlett says

    September 9, 2021 at 8:31 pm

    IBM have said it will be made available on the 28th September (or the last week of September) as part of SS1 option 3 . You will also need to be up to date on the HTTP Group PTFs as it runs under ADMIN1 and the DB2 Group PTFs because this uses the DB2 for i Services (previously known as SQL Services). I’m sure there will be clear instructions from IBM later.

    In fact the instructions are from the link below, but the HTTP PTF group is not yet available:-
    https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/6485477

    And there is a video here
    https://community.ibm.com/community/user/power/viewdocument/demo-new-navigator-for-i?CommunityKey=f0246bc4-08f3-43c5-a7f8-b6a64d387894&tab=librarydocuments

    Reply
  5. Jim Davidson says

    April 11, 2022 at 10:21 pm

    Once again, IBM has taken a lean and efficient interface (Heritage iNav) and made it ‘pretty’ and inefficent. This seems to be the norm now since the HMC interace was made ‘pretty’ and vastly more inefficient than the old one.

    While added functionality is always appreciated, the use of icons rather than plain-English links seems to be oriented towards children rather than
    business people that actually need to get work done.

    Reply

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