PM for Power Systems Is No More
By Dawn May / November 24, 2020
PM for Power Systems was withdrawn, effective September 30, 2020. If you were using this service, you need to take some actions.
I have not worked with many shops that used PM for Power Systems, so I cannot comment on the impact this withdrawal may have in the IBM i marketplace. However, if you were using this service, you need to take some actions.
First, stop transmitting performance data to IBM.
Next, determine whether you can safely end the collection of performance data by the PM Agent. This depends upon whether you have enabled historical data collection on 7.3 and later releases.
I recently wrote about how you should enable historical data collection and use Graph History to review your performance trends over extended periods of time. To specify historical data retention period beyond one month of summary data and seven days of detailed data, the data retention configuration required the PM Agent to collect data on your partition. If you simply turn off PM agent data collection, you may unexpectedly limit your historical data collection.
Thankfully, this has been addressed with the 3Q20 Navigator for i Service Pack. In this service pack, IBM updated the Historical Data retention configuration and removed the requirement of the PM agent running to collect data for long periods of time. Follow these instructions to stop the PM Agent once you have this service pack installed.
You can now simply specify the retention values for summary and detail data without any dependency of the PM agent running, as you can see in the following screen capture:


The key message, for those of you on 7.3 and later, is do not turn off the PM Agent until you have the 3Q20 Navigator service pack installed.
Tagged as:
IBM i / Article / Community / Systems management / Data management / i Can blog
About the author
Dawn May is an IBM i consultant. She owns Dawn May Consulting, LLC in the Greater Boston area. Dawn is a former IBM senior technical staff member.
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