Case Study: Shell Canada achieves lights-out AS/400 operations with Fortra's MessengerPlus automated monitoring

MessengerPlus Keeps Shell Canada’s Unstaffed Operations Flowing

Shell Canada consolidated its mainframe operations onto an AS/400 ERP platform in 1995 and established a largely “lights-out” unstaffed installation of four large AS/400s with seven LPARs supporting critical financial functions nationwide. Monitoring with IBM’s PagerPac/400 proved too limited—no job queue, ping, backup or email alerts—so the systems team, led by John Thiers, needed a more capable alerting and automation solution to keep the environment running with a small support staff.

They deployed Bytware’s MessengerPlus, which quickly installed and began sending targeted alerts to pagers, phones and email, executing corrective CL commands, and monitoring disk failures, network interruptions, job errors, CPU and temporary disk use, and storage thresholds (alerts at 80%). MessengerPlus handles about 30,000 batch jobs monthly, generates 600–1,500 messages per month, provides job-queue and ping monitoring, and routinely prevents outages—enabling automated responses and reducing the need for on-site intervention.

Shell

John Thiers

Senior Staff Systems Analyst