Health Checker
A z/OS component that regularly checks system settings against recommended practice and reports anything that looks wrong.
Also written IBM Health Checker for z/OS, health check, SDSF CK, HZSPROC
IBM Health Checker for z/OS runs a set of checks on a running system and reports problems before they cause trouble. Each check looks at one area, such as whether important datasets have backups, whether sysplex settings are safe, or whether security settings follow IBM's recommendations.
Checks come from IBM and from other software vendors, and sites can write their own. They run at regular intervals. When a check finds something that does not meet its recommendation, it raises an exception, with a message explaining the problem and what to do about it.
System programmers review the results, often in SDSF's CK panel, which lists every check and its latest state. Some exceptions are real problems to fix. Others are differences the site has chosen deliberately, and the check can be adjusted or marked as accepted.
Health Checker results are useful evidence for audits too, because they show that a system is being checked against a known standard. It runs as a started task, usually called HZSPROC.
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- System programmerThe person who installs, configures, tunes and upgrades the operating system and its subsystems.
- PARMLIBThe library of members that holds z/OS's own settings, read when the system starts and on some commands.
- SDSFThe tool for looking at what jobs are running, what has finished, and what output they produced.
- RACFThe security manager for z/OS, which decides who may sign on, read a dataset, or run a transaction.
- z/OSThe main operating system that runs on IBM mainframes, in the same way Windows or Linux runs on a laptop or server.