Overview
IBM z/OS Change Tracker is a change management tool for tracking, controlling, and managing changes in software, enhancing the security of the IBM z/OS® operating environments.
Key features
Key features in z/OS Change Tracker include:
- Real-time monitoring of all change activities in critical system software and mission-critical application software automatically. z/OS Change Tracker is used to establish base versions for library members and to automatically generate versions of each member as users introduce changes.
- Detection of the key elements of changes.
- Who made the change?
- When was the change made?
- What lines in the source member have changed, or which bytes were changed in load modules?
- Why was the change made?
- Which programs introduced the change?
- Automated member-level backup. Members of protected resources are automatically backed up creating stacked versions.
- Member-level recoverability. z/OS Change Tracker provides a list of stacked versions in an ISPF table. In this list, users can view contents of the member versions online, compare pairs of versions for details of the change, and recover the required version to resolve an unwanted change.
- Member-level control feature controls library changes. Selected groups of members can be made exclusively available to a list of authorized TSO IDs or a RACF® group.
- Enables documentation of changes introduced to critical members of a protected resource. When the user edits and saves a member, the user is prompted to document the reason for the change. This feature can be activated for selected resources when the data set is defined for protection.
- Change detection applied to production load libraries. This ensures system software and application software availability and integrity, using the z/OS Change Tracker tokenization technology.
- Comparing multiple local or remote software environments. z/OS Change Tracker identifies changes between any two z/OS environments. The report highlights missing data sets and missing or changed members. For z/OS UNIX or zFS directories, the report contains missing paths and missing or changed files in the two environments. If the two z/OS or zFS environments have the same configuration and the same contents, RC=0 is returned.
- z/OS Change Tracker is set up to use English as a supplied default but can be customized to use Japanese.
z/OSMF plug-in
The IBM z/OS Change Tracker z/OSMF plug-in provides an interactive GUI front-end for IBM z/OS Change Tracker. This plug-in is accessed from the z/OSMF desktop.
The plug-in includes a Monitored Resources view for managing resources on the
protection list, and other features such as viewing the change history of data sets,
member-level backup and recovery, and checkin and checkout of members. 
You can also compare pairs of data sets or compare data sets on a
pair of volumes.