Pivotor by EPS: Intelligent, Educational and Affordable Performance Reporting

Discover how EPS can enhance your performance through education, Health Checks and Pivotor, a comprehensive and affordable z/OS performance reporting service.

At Enterprise Performance Strategies, Inc. (EPS), we have a long history with all things mainframe performance and capacity planning. Our experts have worked extensively in z/OS design, development and measurement architecture, as well as having worked with hundreds of mainframe shops in every industry you can think of. Our mission is to help organizations of all sizes optimize their hardware and software resources, enhance the performance of their workloads and both understand and reduce their MSU usage.

EPS offers a variety of mainframe performance services, including educational webinars, in-depth performance workshops and Health Check War Room consulting engagements. However, the premier EPS offering is Pivotor, a unique and powerful tool and service for performance reporting and analysis of mainframe software and hardware environments.

Pivotor: Excelling at Performance Reporting

When creating Pivotor, Scott Chapman and I knew it was important that it would be conceived, designed and developed by mainframe performance experts who have experience in z/OS design and development. Having worked with hundreds of mainframe shops, it is apparent that our expertise and experience are infused into the product. One of Pivotor’s fundamental goals is to ensure the mainframe community benefits from the Actual Intelligence of the years of experience that we have built into Pivotor. This is what makes our service stand out from other products. We even have a Free Tier of Pivotor for small shops that only want limited reporting on one system.

Established in a recent user group survey, our customers shared with us their top uses of Pivotor:

One 7+ year Pivotor user from a Fortune 500 Financial Company remarks that “the Pivotor service has been invaluable for us, not only with consumable metrics, but the professional analysis that accompanies it. There are several tools in the space that can display data, but the combination of their expertise plus the customizable data is the true value”. As this user mentioned, we have the typical features expected in a performance data reporter, but also some notable and customizable reporting and features not found in other offerings:

• Outlier Detection and Analysis: Pivotor’s Outlier detection and reporting harnesses machine learning to flag unusual data while avoiding many of the pitfalls exhibited by traditional anomaly detection techniques. Finding anomalous measurements is important, but the real value is that Pivotor makes those findings available to the z/OS performance analyst in a suitable and user-friendly format. Scott Chapman presented on the introduction of this feature last year – all of our presentations, including the one discussing this 2024 update, are available for download.
• Playlist Analysis: Pivotor’s reports are well organized and accessible via a navigation panel. As an added feature, Pivotor highlights what we call reporting “playlists”. Think of a music playlist – our Pivotor playlists “play” a canned analysis. Think of these playlists as a thought-out sequence of reports that walk you, the user, through this analysis. Along the way, the user is presented with “helps”, and when possible, recommendations based on Actual Intelligence.
• Pre-generated Reports: All Pivotor reports are pre-generated. This not only has the advantage of making the reporter super-fast, but it also allows for historical assembly and viewing of the reports for any chosen period. All reports are also viewable in a calendar format as one way for the analyst to note trends.

• Sophisticated Exception Reporting: Pivotor’s exception reporting can employ both simple and complex conditions based on cross examination of values across different data sources and can base exceptions on rules, thresholds, deviations and frequency. In addition, Pivotor has the smarts to separate and highlight reporting of “exceptions met and really warranting investigation” versus just “exceptions met”.
• Automatic Data Aggregation and Un-aggregation: This is one of Pivotor’s most powerful features and needs to be seen to really be appreciated. To maintain long-term data, most other products sacrifice granularity by summarizing into hourly averages, daily averages, etc., and then throw away the granular data. Instead, Pivotor keeps the granularity of data and then automatically aggregates that data during the reporting experience. The user can then “zoom” to un-aggregate the data.

Pivotor has many additional noteworthy features, including:

• Support for nearly all major SMF records, DCOLLECT, z/VM, IMS perf logs and more
• Reports available in both Dashboard and Calendar format
• Data explorer report interface to create your own reports
• Long-term reporting for trending
• Expanded “helps” to explain reports and usage
• Customizable reporting
• Ability to incorporate business metrics into performance reports
• Ability to support customer application measurements
• Report overlays for visual comparison
• Sophisticated search and tagging of reports for drill-down
• Flexible time filtering and zooming
• Application attribution to allow the reporting of identified applications
• Report data downloadable in CSV format
• And much more!

Our technical staff are available to answer performance questions throughout the year. Such questions can be as simple as “what does this report mean?” to “I just upgraded to a new level of z/OS, can you tell me how things are performing?”, to “We are thinking of upgrading to a new processor, can you tell us your thoughts?”. We also proactively inform customers of recommendations and possible performance problems. Clients also benefit from an annual cursory performance review. Sign up for a free demo and cursory review to learn more about how we can help you.

Beyond Pivotor: Education

Education is a pillar of our organization, and we are proud to offer various avenues to share our expertise. Our most well-known and notable opportunity is our free performance webinars, offered semi-regularly and on a wide range of technical topics. When available, we post our schedule to https://www.pivotor.com/webinar.html, as well as send email announcements out – contact us to be notified of these.

Our Mainframe Performance YouTube Channel also features a wide range of technical subjects in a short, easily digestible video format for a quick lesson. As an example, one of our most popular videos (below) showcases my z/OS Workload Manager (WLM) guideline for the optimal number of WLM service class periods, explained in just over 13 minutes.

EPS also offers three extensive and in-depth virtual workshops each year where students get to work with their own data and mainframe environment during class time. These workshops garner rave reviews from students as they learn a lot they can take back to work with them. Including a follow-up review with each student after changes have been implemented, our z/OS performance workshops are a great investment to your team’s knowledge base. Essential z/OS Performance Tuning, Parallel Sysplex & z/OS Performance Tuning, and WLM Performance & Re-evaluating Goals are all on the schedule for this year. To see the outlines and pricing of these workshops, visit our website.

Some organizations are also looking for an in-depth analysis of their environment – this is where our Health Check® War Room offering comes in. Held virtually, we will work together to review serious performance issues and provide an overall Health Check of the customer’s environment.

Our mission at EPS is to provide our customers with the type of expertise and assistance we would want to receive if the roles were reversed. Our Pivotor software, consulting, and education services were all curated with the customer in mind. With our extensive experience of over 60 years in the IBM mainframe environment and 24 years of collaboration with our customers, we are confident in our ability to help you achieve optimal mainframe performance cost-effectively, while also offering valuable learning opportunities.

Take the first step towards a more efficient and effective mainframe environment by reaching out to us. Visit our website www.epstrategies.com today!

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