XM4DB2 is a multi-component software application that implements a complete infrastructure for monitoring and assessing DB2’s operational capability. These components include: the primary Director task, several Observer tasks - one for each LPAR, and the User Interface. Each LPAR, having one or several DB2 instance(s) to be tracked, needs an XM Observer task. The central control module is the XM Director task. Director and Observers communicate via TCP/IP. The Director is controlled and interrogated through an ISPF interface that provides a single management point for all DB2 operations.

The Director orchestrates the Observers’ gathering, timing and assessment criteria. Observation, examination and assessment are the charter of the Observers. This approach greatly reduces the amount of data that needs to be transmitted from the Observers to the Director. In essence, only the data to describe an exception needs to be collected and passed on to the Director.

The scope of observation and the extent of the assessment may vary from DB2 to DB2 (or Group). The XM user determines this via the ISPF interface and the Director transmits the corresponding commands to the Observers. An Observer splits form time to time into a number of subtasks to carry out the observations and examinations. One Observer supervises all of the DB2s on its LPAR.

The XM4DB2 user interface is ISPF-based and consists of three parts:

• The exception display - shows the currently recognized and reported exceptions for every involved DB2 subsystem or DB2 Group.
• The history display -shows all the exceptions that ever have been recognized.
• The administration display - allows the setting of the thresholds and other parameters for each concerned DB2. It further allows the maintenance of the Recipients Table for the alert messages (emails) and also the Exclude Table that contains objects that are to be excluded from supervision. The Exclude Table is useful when certain objects or databases are regularly unavailable due to maintenance or change activities.

Metrics, as well as, exceptions descriptive fields are kept in DB2 tables under the control and maintenance of the Director Task. This makes all of that valuable information available for third party programs. Both the Director and Observers are started tasks written in C/C++.