PM for Power Systems Is No More
PM for Power Systems was withdrawn, effective September 30, 2020. If you were using this service, you need to take some actions.
Back in June, IBM announced that PM for Power Systems was being withdrawn, effective September 30, 2020. The announcement feels stealthy since I didn’t come across the announcement letter until recently. PM for Power Systems allowed users to send performance data to IBM and access free reports. It also had the option to sign up for a service offering for more in-depth reports. IBM would store up to two years of performance data which was useful to visualize performance trends over time. You could also use this performance data as input to the IBM Systems Workload Estimator for a sizing exercise.
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:
If you do not yet have this latest service pack, you will still see the requirement for the PM Agent be active for longer historical data retention periods:
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.