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Other Change Management products are mainly electronic paper and have no capability to prevent unauthorised and undocumented changes from being made. This can lead to huge delays and use of resources when trying to locate the cause of a problem that resulted from an undocumented change.
Unlike other change management products, eventACTION does not require the use of specific tools to make changes. It works transparently regardless of the tools used, so that all changes made are tracked, providing a comprehensive picture.
eventACTION and ussACTION provide:
- Change event tracking including,
- A Scan function that quickly shows what changes have been made to selected resources over a defined period
- Statistics showing who changed what, when and how
- Backups for the critical and/or important resources
- An easy Compare feature to determine what was changed
- The event tracking process cannot be bypassed, even if the eventACTION Started Task is stopped
- Change Control function provides direct real-time multi-level control over MVS Datasets/Members and zFS or HFS Directories/Files.
- Control Options include:
- Change Request required,
- and single or multiple Authorization required,
- and Scheduling Window required for the change to be made
- Changes can no longer be made unless the requirements governing the Dataset/Member have been fulfilled
- Prevents unauthorized users and/or programs from making undocumented changes
- Documents all changes including the Change Request and Authorization
- Improves security by advancing the level of control to the dataset member level
- The Compare feature easily determines what was changed
- Recovery of Datasets/Members to the point of loss, whether due to damage or deletion
- Has full reporting suite for various Support groups and Management, including email for non-TSO staff
Command Tracking and Control Component, can track, control & log MVS operator commands, which are issued from operator terminals, TSO, batch, or started tasks.
- The flexible command definitions include masking, can authorize commands by user and location.
- Particularly useful for managing the use of ‘SET’, ‘HCD’, and $P type commands.
- The Command Manager log can be browsed instead of syslog, to enable a quick search with multiple selection criteria such as Program, who, console, date/time, etc.
- The Command Manager log can be ‘printed’ using the Report feature.
Tracking of Changes
Track authorized & unauthorized changes to system data sets
eventACTION can protect and automate the management, tracking, and controlling of all changes in the z/OS system environment.
Product must handle tracking changes cross-LPAR and cross-SYSPLEXes that access shared DASD
The eventACTION database can be fully shared by the eventACTION product running on multiple z/OS systems in a shared DASD environment. Thus eventACTION can track changes across LPARs and SYSPLEXes that access shared DASD.
Track changes to PDS, PDSE, sequential, VSAM, binary or text
eventACTION’s tracking and control support the following z/OS system data set organizations: PDS, PDSE, sequential, VSAM, and DA, as well as Panvalet and Librarian. Under z/OS Unix System Services (USS) eventACTION supports HFS and zFS files.
Track dynamic changes made using console commands
eventACTION's Command Tracking allows you to log/track Operator Commands. The commands can be any system commands or the operator commands for any subsystem such as JES, IMS, CICS, etc. In particular the use of the "SET" command can be tracked.
As well, the Dynamic Data Set Definition Facility allows you to track dynamic changes to the key in-storage lists maintained in a z/OS environment. These lists include the APF list, the LPA list, the LINK list and the PARM list. As data sets within these lists change, eventACTION tracks changes to the revised list of data sets.
Track changes to USS files and file systems down to file level
The component ussACTION provides automatic change and reference tracking for USS directories and files down to the file level.
Have the ability to define user groups (i.e. DBA, CICS, storage, etc.) with multiple products for each and be able to restrict entries by group and/or products individually
eventACTION’s full masking capability allows you to easily group together resources which have the same tracking and control requirements. Using a combination of OID and User Group you can setup rules to group resources, masking allows flexibility of definition including sub-groups. With the use of a perpetual Change Request, changes can be restricted or allowed by group, dataset, or even to member level.
Specify options for what to track and retention time period both globally, by groups and down to a member level
eventACTION can track and control resources at multiple levels. eventACTION tracks and controls resources using either system wide defaults (global), or definitions for groups of related or associated resources, or down to a member level.
Quickly be able to determine what changed and details of when and how changed
The online and real-time “Scan Changes” function provides the ability to quickly obtain information regarding the changes that have been made to a data set or a group of data sets. Information provided includes who made the change, what resource was changed, when it was changed, what tool or process was used to make the change. As well the specific details of the change can be displayed with the Compare facility.
Track SVC changes
The eventACTION SVC update interface allows you to track all changes made to the system SVC and ESR tables, including those made using the z/OS SVCUPDTE facility and those made by code that directly changes the SVC table. This facility helps you to understand the dynamic changes made to a z/OS system where there are a large number of products from multiple vendors. The facility can be very useful for problem resolution.
Interfaces with existing systems/software
Execute on z/OS 1.9 – 1.11 system with JES3 and shared DASD, non-shared USS file systems
eventACTION supports any version of z/OS supported by IBM, including the JES3 environment. eventACTION can track non-shared DASD as long as the eventACTION database is shared.
Interface with tape system for storage of previous levels with built-in ability to easily restore
eventACTION includes facilities that can transparently back up data sets or members whenever a change is made. Unique resource profile values can be defined which allow individual data sets or members to have varying numbers of backup copies available. These backup copies can exist on either disk or tape storage media, or any combination of both.Long-term backups are stored on tape. When a user wishes to restore or recover backup data from a tape, eventACTION automatically builds a restore job, which contains all of the information required to identify the tape and the location of the backup data.
Ability to interface with ITIL compliant Service Center product. This is the choice for scheduling and authorizing changes
eventACTION provides a bi-directional interface to IBM's Info/Management change management function. We have in development an API to Distributed products. Action Software would work with client staff to implement the ITIL compliant Service Center product interface.
If no interface to ITIL compliant Service Center product, minimally must be able to enter a cross-reference field to match up with the ITIL compliant Service Center product identifier
eventACTION’s change request process allows for user defined data fields, thus a cross-reference field to match up with the ITIL compliant Service Center product identifier could be defined.
E-mail interface to alert staff to authorized and unauthorized changes that are made
With the Email feature of eventACTION even management and staff, who don't have TSO access or who aren't regularly logged onto TSO, can receive information from eventACTION. In particular, email messages can be sent when tracked data is changed.
Web browser interface for management reporting
eventACTION does not have a web browser interface. However, management reporting data can be extracted from eventACTION. All of eventACTION reports can use the email feature to send the reports directly to your desktop. Or you can use the External Language Interface (ELI) to extract management data from the eventACTION database and this data could be used as input into your general purpose reporting system.
Reporting
eventACTION has powerful reporting features that allow the user to define custom reports for change and reference activity to eventACTION defined resources.
Ability to group for control and reporting purposes by functional group (i.e. DBA, CICS, MVS, etc) and by product within those groups
eventACTION provides a series of fixed output report types for which the user may specify various selection criteria to customize the report output. With masking there is a great deal of flexibility in the selection criteria to select by functional group, by sub-group, by dataset and/or member name.
“Canned” and/or sample reports to answer classic audit questions
eventACTION has sample reports. Action Software has worked with our clients over the last few years to customize (as required) the reports to meet the clients’ SOX compliance requirements.
Ability to compare IPL volumes, data set product libraries
eventACTION's batch compare utility has the ability to compare IPL volumes and product libraries down to the member level including load modules.
The compare utility within eventACTION is a file comparison tool whose primary purpose is to indicate where differences occur between two data sets. These data sets may be sequential, VSAM, partitioned or other library organizations including Librarian and Panvalet files. When comparing partitioned or library-type data sets, the members are processed individually to indicate which members are different. Under batch, this utility is extended to perform comparisons of multiple data sets residing on different volumes, locatable by specific volume table of contents (VTOC) or through the catalog. The data sets may physically reside at two different changeplexes.
Access
Two types of users require access to the data – Mainframe Systems Engineers who actually use the product and write to the tracking database, and auditors and others who might be interested in reading the information about what changed
eventACTION has the facility to accommodate the two types of users. Your Mainframe Systems Engineers would be given the appropriate access to use the eventACTION features and facilities. While users such as auditors would just be given 'read' access to view the information about changes or who may be using a product. Users who have read access can view the eventACTION data, however they will not be able to view the actual data set or members unless they have read access to the actual data set.
As well, some of your Mainframe Systems Engineers would be eventACTION administrators. eventACTION can be administered at two levels: globally and by Owner/Resource ID (OID). The Global Administrator assumes overall control of the eventACTION product, while the OID Administrator is responsible for administering tracking and control options for a group of resources.
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