Introduction to NonStop Operations Management

The Operations Staff
Introduction to NonStop Operations Management–125507
2-21
The Support Area
Detailed Duties and Responsibilities
A detailed summary of duties and responsibilities includes:
•
Develop operational routines using DSM facilities, such as TACL, the Distributed
Name Service (DNS), and the Subsystem Programmatic Interface (SPI); and
special customized programs that:
•
Process applications regularly or on an as-needed basis (for example, ad hoc
reports)
•
Monitor the system at regular times (for example, status checks or performance
measurements)
•
Load and shut down applications
•
Start up and shut down the system
•
Start processes on peripheral devices
•
Use TSM to maintain the system and to diagnose hardware problems. Use the TSM
EMS Event Viewer to view and analyze events.
•
Set up tape archiving procedures and document information about tape cycles, tape
locations, the backup strategy, and NonStop TM/MP considerations
•
Manage capacity planning
•
Monitor system, network, and application performance
•
Resolve nonstandard and technical problems
•
As necessary, perform senior-level problem determination, take memory dumps, and
take traces
•
Serve as the Tandem expert for all departments, and accumulate and disseminate
Tandem information
•
Generate system reports for other groups
•
Provide programming assistance by creating specialized Transaction Application
Language (TAL) routines and subroutines and by creating specialized utilities and
subsystems
Standards/Objectives
Technical support specialists are evaluated on the number of problems requiring their
attention, the turnaround time on problems, how well users’ level-of-service
expectations are met, and how well the system is operating.
External Contacts
Technical support specialists interact with programmers in the application development
group; entry-level, intermediate-level, and senior-level operations and support personnel;
management; Tandem analysts; and Tandem customer engineers (CEs).