With V5R1, Rochester’s Operations Navigator team is trying to exploit the strengths of a graphical environment to provide an OS/400 interface that’s not just pretty and intuitive but that actually provides more function than possible with the green screen.

However, before it can surpass the green screen, OpsNav must catch up to it in providing basic system controls, which users have been clamoring for since IBM launched OpsNav with V3R7.

Work with Active Jobs
For running most ad hoc commands, you can’t beat the green screen for performance. However, many users complained that when using OpsNav, they’d have to exit and go to the green screen to do real system work.

With V5R1, OpsNav includes a suite of graphical work management capabilities (Figure 1) that let you work with active jobs, job queues, subsystems, and storage pools so you’ll no longer have to switch back and forth between the GUI and the green screen. OpsNav’s new Work with active jobs command lets you look at the jobs running on the system and see, for example, which jobs are running in which subsystems or how much CPU a job is using, and then cancel the job, modify it, and so on.

GUI Prompter
AS/400 users who had to be dragged kicking and screaming from the green screen will appreciate OpsNav’s new GUI prompter (Figure 2). With V4R4, OpsNav let users run commands and create command definitions, but unlike with the green screen, they needed to know every possible parameter and value and key it in correctly. Now OpsNav will prompt for the parameters and values the same way the green screen would, telling the user what values can be entered for a particular command and providing online help text for each available parameter.

Go Command
V5R1 also marks the OpsNav debut of a function similar to the green screen’s Go CMD, which returns a list of all the commands that have anything to do with a particular topic. Now with OpsNav, you can enter a string followed by an asterisk (i.e., CRT*), and OpsNav will give you a list of all the commands having anything to do with that string (in this case, all the create commands), and you can pick one and prompt for it.

Management Central
With V4R5, Management Central provided the ability to check system status and monitors via a cell phone or personal digital assistant (PDA). V5R1 extends that wireless function so you can not only see the monitors and individual jobs, but control them as well, entering system commands through the PDA.

OpsNav’s user profile interface now integrates with Management Central so that you can create a new user simultaneously on multiple systems by keying in the values for their user profile and telling Management Central which systems the profile should be on. V5R1 also lets you inventory users in the same way that you’ve kept track of your network’s hardware and software in the past. For example, you can search for all users whose profiles are disabled or who haven’t logged on in the past 30 days.

A new licensed program GUI in Management Central lets you package your own application as a licensed program and have it treated by the system as such. You get version control, the ability to create a base portion of the program and objects that can be managed separately, and the ability to create and manage PTFs. In the past, you had to buy products to package your application as an LPP. You can also distribute and install your app through Management Central using scheduling.

Hot New Graphics
The new graphics packed in OpsNav with V5R1 try to show you pictures of your system that make it much easier to troubleshoot problems and carry out system tasks. For example, the Disk Unit Performance Monitor (Figure 3) displays an interactive graphic of a server’s individual storage towers and disk units. You can select a particular disk in the list and see its physical location, or you can find all the disks in a particular disk pool.

The new Database Navigator (Figure 4) builds on the Visual Explain function added in V4R5, which showed you how a database query was carried out by the system. With V5R1, you get not just a picture, but complete control over any object in the picture. For example, you can select a physical file and edit it, view it, reorganize it, generate SQL from it, and so on.

The realtime Performance Graph, introduced in Management Central in V4R3, has always shown you a graph of system performance and let you get more information about a particular data point. But with V5R1, it’s interactive. If you select a data point on the graph, OpsNav will display a bar chart showing the top 20 jobs contributing to that performance. Then you can click on one of those bars and get more information from the Work with active jobs interface and take action (i.e., ending the job, holding it) without having to exit the performance monitor window and go to another interface to do so.

Wizards
The new wizards in OpsNav V5R1 try to automate processes that you do only occasionally, such as configuring Logical Partitioning (LPAR), Clustering, and NetServer.

Other OpsNav enhancements in V5R1 include an AFP Manager that lets you manage printing, Quality of Service (QoS) networking enhancements, and a BRMS plug-in for users of that LPP.