The October 2026 Special Edition of the EPV Technologies newsletter is a single-topic edition dedicated to the 24th EPV User Group. With only two weeks remaining, it lays out the final agenda and full presentation abstracts for this year’s virtual event, held on October 27 and repeated on October 29.
EPV User Group 2026: Session Summaries
The day opens with two training sessions dedicated to new Performance Analysts, before moving into a full programme of tutorials, product previews and customer case studies. Here’s what’s on the final agenda:
Core Session Highlights
- PRSM Overhead: A tutorial examining the metrics and reports used to monitor PR/SM overhead, with reference thresholds and possible causes of excessive overhead — plus an explanation of Hiper Dispatch, the most powerful tool available for reducing it.
- Capture Ratio: An inverse measure of system overhead — the proportion of total CPU or zIIP time that z/OS can attribute to specific address spaces or enclaves. This tutorial covers recognised best practices, monitoring metrics and reports, and the causes of (and remedies for) a low capture ratio.
- EPV zParser and EPV Real Time V18: A product preview covering the most significant improvements in the new version of both products, which share part of their code. zParser reads files (including SMF records) transferred from z/OS to an external platform and forms the foundation of all major EPV products, while EPV Real Time reads SMF records from an in-memory resource via TCP/IP and underpins EPV Real Time CICS and STC.
- EPV zParser: Parsing SMF Data into Elasticsearch: A customer case study analysing SMF data from CDC/IIDR (IBM InfoSphere Data Replication) to measure CPU consumption per subscription and schema. The data flows from the mainframe through an EPV server on Windows NT to a Linux server that streams it into Elasticsearch, showing CPU consumption trends over time.
- EPV for CICS V18 Preview: A first look at the most significant views and features in version 18, including a brand-new TCP view, additional views for transaction abends and RNI activity, new critical events, and daily, weekly and monthly trends for those events.
- Interactive Analysis of Individual CICS Transactions and Db2 Packages with MyEPV: Locating performance problems for individual CICS transactions is difficult in large environments processing millions of transactions a day across Db2, MQ, WebSphere and other subsystems. This session shows how zParser and the MyEPV Dynamic reporting tool solve the problem.
- EPV for MQ V18 Preview: A preview of enhancements in EPV for MQ V18, including new views based on queue statistics to monitor average message residence time, average and total message size, and failures and rollbacks for MQGET and MQPUT operations — plus an efficiency index for MQGET and an estimate of polling time.
- A Reporting System Methodology to Keep Your CPU Consumptions Under Control: Significant CPU increases can arrive as unwelcome surprises. This session demonstrates a reporting system that makes anomalous behaviour easy to detect — and its root cause easy to identify — using the techniques described.
- EPV for z/OS V18: The new version of EPV for z/OS (with EPV zParser) is always the first in the product suite to be developed. This preview highlights the most significant usability and manageability improvements across all EPV V18 products: z17 support, a redesigned exception management system, EPV Report Assistant, EPV Knowledge Center, and new views for DPU usage, address space memory occupancy, and statistical monitoring of batch jobs.
- zIIP on CP (zIIPCP), Possible Causes and Effects: A look at the supervisor/dispatcher approach — based on parameter settings and methods — for assigning zIIP-eligible workloads to GCPs, including some surprising effects and the associated analysis.
- IBM z17 Performance Results: Clients regularly ask whether a new machine is delivering the expected performance. This presentation proposes a methodology for answering that question — defining and verifying expectations and selecting the most significant data and metrics to compare old and new machines — applied to a real-world case study.
Registration and Access
The EPV User Group is a must-attend event for Performance Analysts, offering the chance to share ideas with qualified experts and hear directly from EPV customers. It is free of charge and reserved for EPV customers; if you are not yet a customer but would like to participate, reply to the newsletter to request an invitation.
You can download the October 2026 Special Edition newsletter here. For more information, visit the EPV Technologies website.
