Can you track your software resource consumption in real time? Can you manage to have it displayed anytime, anywhere, from a control room’s wide screen up to your smart phone? Can you set up a monitoring that will warn you well before soft capping is likely to occur? By taking advantage of RMF’s REST API, the answer is: “Yes, you can”.

1. NRB Mainframe Day 2018, October 18th
A practical implementation of the
REST API on z
Jean-Daniel Badet, Head of Mainframe Repository & Process NRB

2. 2
The Challenge
Track
Can you help me track my
software resource
consumption in real time ?
Display
Can you show it
graphically anytime,
anywhere, including on
my mobile ?
Forecast
Can you tell me in
advance when my LPAR
will be soft capped ?
RMF Omegamon Visual Estimation

3. 3
REpresentational State Transfer
• A stateless lightweight protocol
• To exchange data with a remote host
• Based on http methods (GET, PUT, …)
• Using URL’s including query arguments
• Returning a reply as an encoded text
stream (XML, JSON, …)
A “REST” API ?
{REST}
?

4. 4
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="include/perform.xsl"?>
<ddsml xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" ...
<server>
<name>RMF-DDS-Server</name>
<version>ZOSV2R2</version>
<functionality>3203</functionality>
<platform>z/OS</platform>
</server>
<report>
<metric id="8D2670">
<description>image capacity (MSU/h) by partition</description>
...
Example: a GET Request
http://zhost:8803/gpm/perform.xml?resource=",PLEX1,SYSPLEX"&id=8D2670

5. 5
About the RMF DDS Server

6. Linux on z
Apache
6
SYS1
SYS2SYS3
z/OS Sysplex
DDS
PHP
HTTP GET Request
1. Every minute a script polls the
DDS server with GET requests
3. The script decodes the answer, performs
some simple statistical calculations, and
stores the result into a local DB. In some
cases a cap warning message is sent
<?xml version="1.0">
<ddsml>
<report>
<metric id=“CPC”>
</metric>
<caption>
<var>
<name>CPCHPNAM</name>
<value>SYS3</value>
</var>
<var
<name>CPCHMOD</name>
<value>2097</value>
</var>
</caption>
</report>
</ddsml>
XML Response
2. The server replies by sending
back XML documents
HTTP GET
4. Regardless of batch processing, a
user can log on to the Apache server
at any time
XML (SVG)
5. Automatically, the user's session
reloads the data and refreshes the
display every minute
Our Solution

7. 7
•Track resource consumption ?
•Display it anytime, anywhere ?
•Forecast soft capping ?

8. WWW.NRB.BE