Enhanced Preventive Service Planning Tool

IBM has heard how time-consuming it is for you to reconcile the Service Recommendation section of a Preventive Service Planning (PSP) bucket against your systems and to determine which service should be installed on your system. The IBM Enhanced PSP tool is for you!

Using the IBM Enhanced Preventive Service Planning Tool, download the host program to your workstation. (You only need to do this once.) Next, you select the PSP bucket(s) you are interested in and then download the bucket extract file, which contains a list of APAR and FMID pairs for each bucket you selected. Then upload the host file and the bucket extract file to your z/OS system. Run the host program with the bucket extract file against your SMP/e data; this will produce an ERRSYSMOD-like report that tells you which of the associated fixes have not been received or applied on a particular target zone.

You now know which service you must order and apply to bring your system service up to date.

1)Service Recommendation list for Functions
You can now acquire service recommendation lists for selected functions. These are high visibility (RFA Level) cross component functions which do not have a unique orderable component. You can view the currently provided functions by either a) selecting "Function" on the Graphical User Interface on the "Find Bucket Extract Files / By Category" page or b) on the direct ftp page for the extract files (ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/s390/pspapartool/) search for files which have a prefix of "Function". Please note that these service recommendation lists are built dynamically and do not have an underlying UPGRADE and SUBSET in RETAIN.

2) The maintenance lists, which are know as extract files, have been extended to include any SMP/E installable APAR/PTFreferenced in ALL sections of a subset and its associated extensions. When the tool was first released in 08/2004, it only provided the maintenance from the Service Recommendation sections of a subset and its associated extensions. This enhancement provides a much more complete maintenance list since it includes APARs/PTFs from all sections, including the General information section. This should be especially helpful for hardware related buckets. Please note : You may still need to review the subset for planning and migration considerations.

3) The Host Compare program has been updated to better handle concatenated extract files by providing the upgrade(s) and subset(s) that each piece of missing service is from. At the current time, the end user needs to acquire and concatentate multiple extract files if they so desire. This can be done : a) by downloading each extract file from the Graphical User Interface shopping cart and concatentating them on the PC or b) via a host JCL/FTP program which acquires and merges the files from the external FTP site. Please note: If you previously downloaded the host compare tool, you will have to download it again and reinstall to take advantage of this new feature.