Specialty Engines and Kneecapped Processors

Specialty engines such as zIIPs and zAAPs are an integral part of IBM zSeries hardware.  Reporting their use accurately can be confusing, especially if you are not running full size general purpose processors.  This presentation will walk through what a specialty engine is, and how their use is reported in TYPE70 and TYPE72 records.  It will cover the confusion that can result when general purpose engines are not full size – how a transaction can say it used more CPU time than the transaction actually took, even though it ran on only one processor.  It will then clear the confusion by showing various methods to present the data, showing how to tell the story you want your data to tell.