The Coolest AS/400 Program Ever

By far the one of the coolest programs and most commonly used on the AS/400 and iSeries platforms is the Work with Active Jobs display that is built into the operating system. I frequently use this program to quick see at a glance exactly what is happening with the system and to diagnose and problems that may have cropped up.

I find the program incredibly handy because the main screen displays all of the active jobs and subsystems on the system in alphabetical order by subsystem. The more pertinent items it displays are cumulative CPU usage in the top left hand corner which is also listed for each job and current status of each job... I find I make use of these pieces of information on the display more than any of the others.

Now there are two distinctions that should be made when it comes to updating the data fields displayed in Work with Active Jobs. The two options available update the data presented on the screen are a refresh using the F5 key or restart statistics using the F10 key. The key difference is that refresh updates and adds to the current statistics like CPU usage while reset zeros them out and starts over.

Two of the job controlling features built into work with active jobs display that I frequently use is the ability to end jobs and to display messages using options 4 and 7 respectively. Also if you need to display a job log for debugging purposes, which is typical when a job has a message waiting to be answered, you can do this by taking option 5 on the job and on the Work with Job screen that comes up then take option 10 for display job log.

You may find that you would like to see more of the jobs on the display without needing to page up and page down, this is because by default you will have the instructions and key field displays turned on. To change and hide these fields simply toggle with the F21 key, when you do it will remove the F-keys displayed on the bottom of the screen and the options at the top and replace them with a larger display of the subsystem and active jobs.

Two cool little tricks even experienced system administrators don't know about are the sequence and automatic update capabilities. The re-sequence feature allows you to place the cursor over a column of data and sort it, for instance if you where to place the cursor over the elapsed CPU percentage field and press F16 on the keyboard it will sort the jobs by CPU% utilization descending. Now at a glance you can quickly see which jobs have used the most CPU.

To enable automatic refresh simply press F19 on the keyboard. With automatic refresh turned on the Work with Active Jobs program will automatically update the information on the display that you are currently viewing. To make adjustments to the refresh interval all you have to do is prompt the wrkactjob command using F4 before actually starting it and then specify the interval parameter.