Notify the Production Scheduling group when a critical data set exceeds a specified number of extents

Overnight batch jobs have a small window in which they must complete, leaving very little, if any, room for ABENDs and reruns. If a production data set exceeds its available space and causes the batch update job to terminate with an x37 ABEND, online applications might not be able to start in time, and business might be affected.

To monitor for this condition, perform the following steps:

• Create a Dataset Group containing the critical production data sets.
• Define a Situation to raise an alert if any of those data sets approaches the 16 extent limit.
• Add an action to the Situation to send a pager message to the relevant person.
  Note: You can use the name of the data set and the number of its extents as substitution variable in the action.

Create the following situation:

1. Right-click the Dataset Group Summary node in the navigation pane.
2. Click Situations in the pop-up menu. The Situations for - Dataset Group Summary dialog box is displayed.
3. Click the Create new Situation icon () to access the Create Situation dialog box.
4. Enter the name and description of your new situation.
5. Click OK to access the Select condition dialog box.
6. Select S3_Dataset_Group_Details_Volume in the Attribute Group column.
7. Select Extents in the Attribute Item column.
8. Click OK to return to the Situations for - Dataset Group Summary dialog box.
9. In the Formula tab, enter values for Extents. Change the operator to Greater than (>) and enter the value 12.
10. Select the Distribution tab.
11. Add the appropriate managed systems to the Assigned systems list for this situation.
12. Select the Action tab.
13. Click Universal message and enter send message &dsname.
14. Click Apply and OK to complete the definition of your new situation and close the dialog box.

    Whenever the number of extents for your critical data set exceeds your threshold, this situation is triggered and notification is sent.

The paging command that you use depends on the underlying product in the Windows or z/OS® environment.