Objective: build a “watchdog” CARLa program that verifies that the most vital general resource classes on your system are active.

This example shows a CARLa program that generates WTO messages as output to warn operators on the system console. Optionally, AOC (Automatic Operations Console) can be triggered by your WTO message to automatically take the appropriate action.

This CARLa batch job verifies whether the vital RACF general resource classes XFACILIT and UNIXPRIV are inactive. If that is the case, message CKR998I is generated as a WTO and appears in the z/OS SYSLOG.

This screen capture shows how this CKR998I message appears on the operator console when this situation occurs:

For real life usage, you must probably schedule this batch job frequently, for example, every 15 minutes (or hour, 5 minutes). Using a similar approach, you can probably build many more monitoring programs to check your most critical RACF and z/OS settings.

Of course, you can also use zSecure Alert.

Exercise:

Build your own class activity monitor that checks whether some classes are indeed active. Make sure to pick a general resource class that is currently inactive to see your WTO being generated and sent to the z/OS system log. Please also include a message to the operators that this WTO message is a CARLa test and can be ignored by them.

 

 

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Continue with Sending messages to syslogd

 

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