Predictive Failure Analysis (PFA) is designed to predict potential problems with your systems. PFA extends availability by going beyond failure detection to predict problems before they occur. PFA provides this support using remote checks from IBM® Health Checker for z/OS® to collect data about your installation. Using this data, PFA constructs a model of the expected or future behavior of the z/OS images, compares the actual behavior with the expected behavior, and if the behavior is abnormal, PFA issues a health check exception. PFA uses a z/OS UNIX System Services (z/OS UNIX) file system to manage the historical and problem data that it collects.
Here is an LPAR view of the PFA components:
Figure 1. LPAR view of the PFA components
PFA creates report output in the following ways:
- In a z/OS UNIX file that stores the list of suspect tasks. The individual checks contain descriptions of the directory and file names.
- In an IBM Health Checker for z/OS report that is displayed by z/OS System Display and Search Facility (SDSF) and the message buffer.
- Your installation can also set up IBM Health Checker for z/OS to send output to a log stream. After you set it up, you can use the HZSPRINT utility to view PFA check output in the message buffer or in the log stream. For complete details, see Using the HZSPRINT utility in IBM Health Checker for z/OS User's Guide.