SMF is the defacto source of information about all things that happen in a z/OS system, supporting everything from chargeback to capacity planning to security monitoring. Many of the applications that read SMF data now reside on distributed systems.
However, with some installations generating more than 2TB of SMF data per day, getting SMF data to those systems in an efficient and timely manner is a significant challenge. Data compression is an interesting option, but only a few compression formats support SMF spanned variable records. The TERSE one is the most popular of them, but there are no utilities that run on distributed systems that are able to handle the variable record format.
To help address this need, our colleague Mario Bezzi wrote a utility called WWUNTERSE based on IBM’s port to Java of the uncompress function of terse. WWUNTERSE uncompresses files that were created using AMATERSE or TRSMAIN on z/OS. It supports tersed versions of F, FB, V, VB, VS, and VBS data sets (the IBM port doesn’t support tersed VB or VBS files). For blocked variable record length files, it supports the inclusion of the Block Descriptor Word (BDW) in the output file, meaning that the output files can used by products such as MXG/SAS. Because of this support for tersed VB and VBS files, we expect this tool to be particularly of interest to sites looking to efficiently move SMF data to distributed platforms.
One zip file is provided, containing the executable files for both x86-64-bit Windows and x86-64-bit Linux environments, as well as a short User’s Guide in PDF format.
In order to ensure that all WWUNTERSE users have the latest enhancements and fixes, we are requiring all users of this package to provide contact information when they download the package.
When you click on Submit, you will be sent an email containing a link that can be used to download the zip files containing the program and documentation for this package. If you have any questions or problems, please email us.