IBM just announced a new offering, IBM Z IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS, an industry-leading z/OS infrastructure and application performance management solution, IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS. The availability of this offering through IBM is a result of IntelliMagic’s acquisition by IBM on February 29th, 2024.
With this acquisition and the new offering, IBM enhances its IBM Z AIOps offerings with IntelliMagic’s proven innovation that leverages explainable AI for performance teams to increase predictability, accelerate problem solving, and provide the most effective augmentation available for both expert and newer performance team members. This offering supports an on-prem and a cloud hosted delivery model with two products, IBM Z IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS and IBM Z IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS as a Service. The “as a service” provides a secure delivery option that transforms how performance team members collaborate with each other and enables quick access to IBM’s and IntelliMagic’s deep performance domain expertise when required.
“We are extremely excited to add IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS to our AIOps portfolio,” remarked IBM’s Director, AIOps on IBM Z, Sreekanth Ramakrishnan, Ph.D. “With this addition we have even further enhanced our 360 degree mainframe solutions to mainframe customers.”
IntelliMagic’s co-founder and CEO, Els Das, said, “We are excited about the acquisition and what it means for IntelliMagic and IntelliMagic customers. Dr. Gilbert Houtekamer and I founded IntelliMagic with the goal of reducing availability risk and increasing application service levels for our customers, and now we are going to be able to do so for a much larger audience of mainframe sites.”
Achieve What Matters Most to Your Business
IBM Z IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS allows z/OS performance analysts to take control of their end-to-end mainframe environment with interactive insights and customizable reports, to prevent availability risks and to effectively manage and optimize performance and costs. Newer staff experience accelerated learning through easy-to-understand navigation and infrastructure connections and experienced staff have streamlined access to issue analysis and resolution.
The primary user benefits of IBM Z IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS include:
- Prevent availability risks: automated ‘health and risk detection’ flags upcoming hidden bottlenecks, configuration errors, and anomalies before symptoms hurt service levels or bring down applications.
- Safely lower costs: easily identify safe optimization opportunities to increase efficiency and lower software and hardware spend. Rebalance workloads and applications to postpone or avoid new hardware purchases.
- Augment the team: intelligent and unified interface spans infrastructure silos, enables application-specific views, and leverages AI that is a force multiplier for both experts and newer team members.
IBM adds IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS to an already impressive portfolio of IBM Z AIOps solutions that enable mainframe sites complete, uninterrupted insights into their application infrastructure investment.
Main capabilities of IBM Z IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS.
A modern and interactive GUI
Gain intuitive and correlated visibility into the z/OS measurement data from across the z/OS infrastructure, with application-specific views segmented from the shared z/OS infrastructure resources.
IntelliMagic Vision’s single interface used across the entire z/OS platform greatly expedites learning, promotes collaboration, and enhances analytical effectiveness for both experts and newer team members.
Dynamically customizable reports
Advanced click-to-customize capabilities allow ad hoc analysis without requiring programming or complicated steps and enable visualizations best suited to the current inquiry.
IntelliMagic Vision Health Insights
Health Insights are crucial to see potential risks to infrastructure and application availability early. And to accelerate problem solving with explainable, built-in artificial intelligence that automatically assesses and rates the severity of infrastructure best practice violations for more than 700 key z/OS metrics using context-sensitive thresholds based on built-in expert domain knowledge in a thorough not possible for human teams.
Color-coded indicators in the dashboard visually show the health of the infrastructure across different metrics, and the size of the indicator shows the criticality of the exception. This highlights out of the massive amount of measurement data, what is most important for the team members to focus on and why.
IntelliMagic Vision Change Detection views
Automated and flexible z/OS anomaly detection using statistical analysis that highlights statistically significant changes in key metrics are highlighted in Change Detection views. Variations that exceed + or – 2 standard deviations between the current day and the prior 30 days are highlighted. Extreme flexibility for this analysis is built-in, enabling most any area of the infrastructure, filtered subset, configurable time frames, and more to be easily selected.
This accelerates problem solving by quickly seeing what changed in the areas of concern. And it can enable you to get an early jump on changes that may have a negative impact, such as this example of increased CPU consumed by highest dispatching priority system work.
Context sensitive drill downs
Flexible and context-sensitive drill downs enable an analyst to identify the most relevant alternative analytical paths based on the current view so that each hypothesis can be investigated with just a few clicks. This greatly accelerates problem-solving by quickly eliminating “dead-end” paths. When dealing with massive data volumes, this capability to focus analysis on the desired subset of data becomes especially valuable.
Topology views
A wide range of dynamically generated topology views enable an easy understanding of the configuration and dependencies between different elements, such as CICS regions, Db2 subsystems, and MQ subsystems, as shown in the image below. This helps understanding what is affected, if for example, a Db2 subsystem need maintenance and so on. Topology views are also supported for other areas such as processor complex configurations and FICON and storage configurations.
Hosted Cloud Service offering
The value of IBM Z IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS is available as a hosted cloud service offering. The vast majority of existing customers, including some of the world’s largest and most security stringent organizations are running the solution on the cloud because of the strategic benefits of this option.
Advantages to this cloud delivery model include rapid implementation (no lead time to install and setup the product locally), minimal setup (only for automating data transmission), offloading staff resources required to deal with local processing issues or to install product maintenance, and easy access to fractional IntelliMagic and IBM consulting services to supplement local skills.
IBM Z IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS strategic positioning in the zAIOps framework
Looking at the Detect-Decide-Act framework on which IBM Z AIOps strategy is based, IBM Z IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS improve the user experience in the Detect and Decide phases. This enables the performance team to more efficiently and effectively understand the steps required in the Act phase to deliver the service levels for continuous application availability from all the required areas of the z/OS infrastructure.
For example, IBM Z IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS helps in the early detection of IT problems by utilizing automated and intelligent performance assessment of more than 700+ of the most important z/OS infrastructure operation metrics, providing at-a-glance understanding of the risk levels and health of your entire z/OS site. State-of-the-art anomaly detection and statistical analysis highlight risks and notable changes.
Advanced click-to-customization and click-to-query reporting capabilities facilitate quick ad hoc analysis of near real time performance data with advanced visualizations in the manner best suited to the current inquiry. Flexible and context sensitive drill downs enable an analyst to identify the most relevant alternative analytical paths based on the data currently being displayed view so that and quickly investigate each hypothesis can be investigated with just a few clicks. This greatly accelerates problem solving time when exploring a problem by eliminating what ends up being a “dead-end” path to locating root causes. When dealing with massive data volumes, this capability to focus analysis on the desired subsets of data becomes especially valuable.
Call to action.
Read the announcement letter. here
Learn more about IBM Z IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS
Register to the webinar” IBM and IntelliMagic bring vision to IBM Z in the cloud": https://ibm.biz/IntelliMagic-April23