Plan Mirroring on Database

Since 9.1 IBM Workload Scheduler has introduced a new copy of the plan in the Relation Database, this is often called the "Plan Mirroring".

This copy of the plan is used only for plan monitoring from the UI (and from Java APIs) and is still not used for scheduling purposes that continue to work using the Symphony file to assure consistency between Master and agents.
This change has tremendously improved the scalability of the UI with performance test that has shown almost no performance degradation increasing the number of users monitoring the plan.

For end users or cloud customers this is completely transparent, but for IWS Administrators that are managing an on-premise environment this introduces new components in the product architecture that need to be understood, monitored and eventually managed and recovered.

Netman, ITA Agent and their sons

When TWS runs there are many processes involved, some are historical, others has been added in the latest releases for new functionalities.

In order to better manage the environment and autonomously troubleshoot issues, it can be useful to know when they run, which command starts / stops each process, and which main files and which TCP ports they use.

For this reason (and since some customers was asking for this information) I've decided to consolidate here this information, hoping this can be useful also to other TWS admins.

Message flow and processes on FTAs and classic E2E

I've received a request from a customer for information about the flow of messages (events) in Tivoli Workload Scheduler for z/OS classic End-to-End.
With messages I'm referring to the information exchanged between TWS agents and servers in order to start and track job execution, submit new workload, modify existing workload, etc..
I'll not use the word event, that is sometime used in this context, to avoid confusion with the events of Event Driven Workload Automation (EDWA).

This is a very specific and technical topic, however understanding this flow was the first think I made when I started working on the TWSd code to start the porting on z/OS and integration with TWSz (OPC at that time) to make first release of the classic E2E. It was the year 2000 and TWS development was still in Santa Clara, while OPC was already here in Rome. I started creating the diagrams that I'll use in this article and they was on the wall in front of me for several months.
Even if this information is also available in the manuals, I think it could be useful to have this information also on this blog.

The picture above represents the basic message flows for a Fault Tolerant Agent (FTA).