In this blog, I’m going to review some of these little-known features through the IBM Navigator for i Web interface.
Server Jobs
The green screen interfaced has “Work with Active Jobs”, but on the GUI you can also work with Server Jobs. There are a couple nice features that the server jobs view provides:
- It shows the current user profile for that job (WRKACTJOB was changed to show the current user profile in the 6.1 release).
- It shows a text description of what that server job is for in the “Server” column. This lets you identify what a server job is for without understanding the cryptic IBM job naming convention.
- Using the “Include…” dialog, you can also select to display completed jobs with output (whereas with Active Jobs, you can only display … active jobs!)
Job Details
For both Server Jobs and Active Jobs, you can display information about a job through the GUI that you can’t see from the Work with Job green-screen interface.
- There is a column, Thread Count, shown by default, that shows you the number of threads in the job, which allows you to easily identify multithreaded jobs.
- Under Open Files, you can also display file system objects used by the job, not just files in a library.
- With the SQL option, you can view the most recent SQL statement executed by that job and get additional information about that SQL statement – there’s some pretty cool information here – the SQL statement itself, information about the environment such as the client application, client IP address, the interface on which the client request was received and much more.
- For active jobs, you can also display information about Transactions associated with the job (this is not available for Server Jobs).
Beginning with the 7.1 release, for active jobs, you now have improved integration and navigation to various performance tasks. Under Performance, you can now “Investigate Job Wait Data”, which is highlighted in the following screen capture. This option will take you to a chart that displays the Collection Services wait information for that job. See my blog post “IBM i Wait Accounting” for more information on IBM i wait accounting.
As the screen capture above shows, you can also start the Job Watcher performance data collector for an active job. You can also select “Investigate Jobs Wait Data,” “Investigate Jobs Statistics Data” and “Start Job Watcher” from the “Select Action” drop-down bar. If you have a single job selected, the action will apply to that selected job. If no job is selected, the action will be taken for all active jobs, as the following screen capture shows.
Note that for these new options to be displayed, you must have Collection Services active; Collection Services has been started by default since the 6.1 release.
The GUI also has some nice features related to Memory Pools. If you view the Active Memory Pools, you have an option to display the jobs or subsystems that are running in a Memory Pool. This is something that’s only available on the GUI; on the green screen you can sort on the Pool column, but you can filter for just one specific pool.
I hope you found some of these tips useful.
This blog post was edited for currency on January 31, 2020.
This blog post was originally published on IBMSystemsMag.com and is reproduced here by permission of IBM Systems Media.