What is GoalTender?

Cheryl Watson’s GoalTender™ helps you manage WLM goal mode.  It implements Cheryl’s WLM analysis methods and shows her recommendations for tuning your service definitions, and through them, your sysplex performance.

How does GoalTender Work?

GoalTender is composed of two parts.  The first part is Cheryl Watson’s Tracker™, a started task that runs continuously on all systems. Tracker collects and maintains a database of WLM service definitions, WLM service policies, certain operator actions, and SMF type 70 and 72 data.

GoalTender is a batch job that uses this data to produce a series of reports, along with extensive recommendations developed from hundreds of real-life tuning experiences.

What will GoalTender Show me?

Cheryl’s Advice – The warnings, advice and recommendations created by Cheryl regarding goal mode best practices appear automatically in GoalTender reports whenever conditions arise to trigger them.  Taken as a whole, they comprise some of the most thorough goal mode documentation available anywhere.

Exception Reports

Summary Report – This summarizes the activity for the analysis period (e.g. the last 24 hours) to quickly show you the most critical items — the three most active intervals and the three intervals with the worst goal performance.

Interval Report – This report provides an in-depth look at selected intervals, showing how each service class period performed and the probable reasons for any underperformance.

Missed Goals Report – This report shows missed goals for the entire analysis period as well as many other conditions needing your attention, and can be sorted by time and/or importance.  Again, our advice will tell you why your system is performing badly and what you might do about it.

Other Useful Reports

• Service Definition Report – This is an annotated listing of your service definitions and policies, along with Cheryl’s suggestions, if any, for improvement.
• Servers Report – This shows which service classes are being used as servers and which are being served, as well as the volume of activity.
• Importance Report – This shows the amount of work at each importance level and whether lower priority work is getting squeezed out by higher importance work.
• Tracker Log– This log shows the contents of Tracker’s database of policies, events and SMF data.  You can tell, for instance, when policies were activated or when an operator changed a job’s service class.

What Environment does GoalTender Require?

GoalTender and Tracker are written in IBM Assembler language and require only that you be in goal mode and at OS/390 V2R10 or later.

How Much does GoalTender Cost?

The initial license fee for a site license is only $2500, with an annual license fee renewal of $1625.

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Is there a trial period?

If you are not satisfied with GoalTender, remove it within the first 45 days and owe nothing.

Where Can I Get More information?

Click here for a more lengthy presentation showing samples of the reports.

How do I order GoalTender?

Click here to obtain a License Agreement.  Fill it out and return it to us.  Once we receive it, GoalTender can begin working for you!