DSXchange

My management (we're a bank) has asked me to put together a document called "BAU Activities and Processes to Support InfoSphere Information Server". I have some ideas, but would like to pick your brains.

My initial list of headings is:

• Backups and Archiving
  Cleaning Up Periodically
  Monitoring
  DataStage Administration
  Information Server Administration
  Troubleshooting and Remediation
  Business Process Tracking
  Data Quality
  Regulatory and Business Compliance
  Capacity Planning

If you have ideas for other headings, or any detailed information you'd like to contribute, I would be more than grateful.

[Edit] We do have Enterprise Search installed, too.

Thank you for your time.

My guess is if they're asking you for that, they are probably asking everyone else too. Ask if they have a template with the headings already defined.

These might be new or they may fit into your existing headings:
- define your role and responsibilities
- working with IBM Support
- working with internal support teams (storage, servers, network, firewall, etc)
- software licensing and annual renewals
- development standards and naming conventions (you may have a role in defining/enforcing those, or not)
- disaster recovery planning and testing
- scheduling and documentation
- expected uptime, maintenance windows, your support hours, coverage/on call rotation

The big one for me is people skills. Arguably this comes under governance, but it's vital that each role has its shadow, and that people are properly trained to perform their roles. Too often have I seen people thrown in at the deep end, and expected to learn skills by osmosis.

Keeping corporate knowledge in house and up to date (that is, documentation) is no less important.

Thank you for those responses, they will be very useful.

I believe that I was the only one asked to undertake this task (I am the most senior practitioner in the team).

Thank you again for your time.

Can people please add to my list of things that need to be cleaned up periodically?

• files on scratch disk older than, say, seven days
  Data Sets that are no longer required
  files in &PH& subdirectory in each project
  IMAM import areas that are no longer needed

Thank you for your time.

When bringing the server processes down, once no users are connected and no jobs running, I have scripted to remove:
- DataStage related files under /tmp
- all files from each $TMPDIR location for each project
- HA_STATUS/* files under each project directory
- lookuptable* files
- core* dump files
- heapdump* dump files
- javacore* dump files
- orbtrc* dump files
- Snap* dump files

The dump files are scattered several places like under ASBNode, ASBNode/bin, and under /home/<user> directories. The software dumps a lot. Some of those files are large and over time can fill up a file system if not cleaned up.