Why Should You Delete Journal Receivers?

I am often asked about best-practice ways of housekeeping IBM i systems. On my list of the top three tips would be setting up a process to automatically delete journal receivers.

Journal receivers grow quickly and therefore, by their very nature, take up large volumes of valuable disk space. We know, in today’s highly-regulated industries, that journals are often used for recording sensitive data changes—you may want to keep this information around longer than usual. We also know that developers sometimes turn on journaling and forget about it. So, I’d like to share my recommendations for protecting your IBM i system from this abuse.

As you already have your backup process running and your high availability (HA) application process in place, you don’t need to retain journal receivers indefinitely. Instead, you should be able to set up a business rule within your monitoring software to automatically delete them after a set time period. Most HA products will take care of themselves.

Your monitoring software should allow you to quickly and easily delete journal receivers based on the date. If it doesn’t, find out why not. In some instances, you may not want to delete the journal receivers, so you should also be able to set up an alert to notify you that an excessive number of journal receivers exist.

This process of automatically deleting journal receivers will save you considerable time by quickly and easily identifying journal receivers by date or when last amended and then simply deleting. It will also enable effective housekeeping of your production system and has the potential to significantly reduce disk space usage.

Automatic Clean-Up for Journal Receivers

Remember, excessive disk space usage causes your backups and disk reporting to take longer. Robot Space is a great tool for reporting on abuse and it can take action to clean it up, too.

Monitoring disk space usage is a repetitive and never-ending task. Use the seamless interface between Robot Space and Robot Schedule to run jobs that collect and monitor disk space information, perform storage clean-up tasks, purge old disk space statistics, and print reports. You can schedule jobs to run on specific dates, at specified intervals, or based on schedule exceptions that override the regular schedule. You also can start a Robot Schedule job automatically when a monitored ASP exceeds its storage threshold.

If Robot Schedule encounters a problem during a job, it uses Robot Alert notification software to send a message to any device—laptop, tablet, or smartphone. If a critical storage condition exists, Robot Space uses Robot Alert to send a message to the designated expert.

Plus, the current storage option in the Critical Storage Investigator feature in Robot Space allows you to submit a System Health Report or a collection group. If you’re using Robot Schedule, you can schedule the System Health Report or a collection group to run regularly. When these are complete, you can see the most recent information about disk usage on your system.