Written by Brett Allison and Ed Hayman
IBM is excited to announce a new integration between IBM IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS and IBM Apptio Mainframe TCO that provides unprecedented clarity into mainframe application usage while reducing manual efforts and improving cost transparency between infrastructure and finance teams.
Challenges Tracking Mainframe Application Performance:
The stakeholders of business-critical applications need to understand how their applications are performing and consuming resources to fully understand and appreciate the value of the mainframe. Unfortunately, most mainframe shops still rely on legacy approaches for tracking mainframe performance and capacity, which presents several key challenges:
1. Complex Home-Grown Solutions
In order to provide meaningful relationships between system resources and applications, complex home-grown applications requiring legacy coding skills are created to create relationships between applications and infrastructure resources. The solutions rely on diminishing mainframe skill sets, leading to a high risk to the business when the expert retires. We encounter this challenge with our customers every single day.
2. Manual Data Manipulation
Oftentimes the output of a number of complex batch jobs provides text reports that have to be manipulated in spreadsheets to perform the connection between mainframe identifiers and asset management identifiers leading to labor intensive efforts with a high risk of errors. Every one of our customers that does this type of activity has a large number of customized batch jobs and oftentimes they import the output of the batch jobs into complex Excel sheets to massage the data prior to sending it to their showback / chargeback system.
3. Siloed Visibility
The infrastructure teams are always in different reporting organizations than the finance teams. This leads to a lack of transparency between the lines of business and the mainframe teams.
The capability to organize the data has provided many of our customers with a bridge to have regular calls with the businesses showing them how their applications are using the mainframe leading to critical business insights and connecting the technical and non-technical stakeholders in new ways.
Code Free, Turn-Key, Expert-Infused Solution
IBM’s IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS has been transforming the way that mainframe performance and capacity SMEs have performed their work for the last two decades. What was once a domain where code was required to be written for every static performance and capacity report, IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS provides a code free, turn-key, expert infused performance and capacity solution accessible to the next generation of analysts.
Over the last decade we have worked closely with dozens of customers to understand their requirements surrounding mapping workloads along meaningful organizational boundaries. The outflow of these conversations and product enhancements has led to the creation of a flexible and intuitive way to tag the data along business lines. Organizing the data along the business lines is the first step in creating a bridge between mainframe technologists and the lines of business they support.
IBM Z IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS provides an automated and user configurable method for organizing the workload measurement data from RMF and SMF that includes
- Address Space/Job/ User ID
- Service Class
- Report Class
- System, others (CF structures, TCPIP addr, ..)
- Db2 Activity (Db2 Authid, & 7 others)
- CICS Activity (CICS transaction ID, Program Name (initially invoked)
- IMS (CICS transaction ID)
Based on the measurement data, users can organize the data into as many as eight different levels of classification such as:
- Application name
- Product name
- Region
- Organization
- …
This solution addresses the complex home grown solutions based on legacy programming languages and reduces the need for manual manipulation of the data. Most businesses have some type of asset management databases such as ServiceNow that provide mappings between the business names and departments and their associated applications. These mapping tables can automatically infuse IntelliMagic with the relationships between the businesses and their product and application names.
Easily Analyze Business Applications for Non-Technical Stakeholders
The user can easily configure the settings to organize the data without requiring any code or legacy skills. With the customized user defined settings, IBM Z IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS automatically organizes the CPU and other resources. The user can then analyze the performance and capacity trends based on the business applications enabled by linking the technical measurement data to the non-technical stakeholders in terms of applications or lines of business.
The integration with IBM Apptio Mainframe TCO allows IBM IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS to automatically provide workload resource by application feeds directly to IBM Apptio Mainframe TCO which provides cost transparency into mainframe resources.
The following image is an example of an application defined view which provides breakdowns by applications in terms of GCP and zIIP processor usage:
The pie charts display the breakdown of GCP and zIIP usage by Product Line Names which is one of the levels of organization supported by IBM IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS.
IBM Z IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS is ideally situated to provide automatic, code free application workload information to IBM Apptio Mainframe TCO solution which provides complete cost transparency for mainframe customers. This integration will leverage the rich z/OS source of data and organizational capabilities of IBM’s IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS with IBM Apptio Mainframe TCO’s leading solution for IT Financial Management to provide a seamless, flexible, high fidelity, automated solution that bridges the technical and non-technical stakeholders of enterprise applications.