Since the 1980s, capacity planners have used Merrill’s Expanded Guide (MXG) by Merrill Consultants to turn raw mainframe System Measurement Facility (SMF) records into detailed reports, insightful graphics and clarifying charts to better understand and manage their mainframe environment. Over the years, MXG has continued to shift much of the burden of day-to-day data management off of capacity planners. As a result, and as SMF record creation evolved and became more detailed, the process of collecting, sorting and storing the huge number of records generated by SMF has, in many cases, become one of the top ten CPU workloads on the mainframe.