By Sreekanth Ramakrishnan, PhD, and Els Das
Back in February, IBM acquired the IntelliMagic company with their industry-leading z/OS performance analytics solution, IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS. The acquisition will provide mainframe sites with uninterrupted insights into their application infrastructure.
Effectively managing the performance of the z/OS infrastructure has always been essential for mainframe sites to ensure continuous availability of their business-critical applications. The emergence of AI allows greater insights to be derived without the need for time-consuming manual analysis and despite the mainframe skills shortage.
With SMF and RMF, z/OS has the richest set of measurement data of any computing platform. Historically, this rich but immensely large set of data involves deep and decade-long expertise and time-consuming manual analysis to get the full value out of it. IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS’s application of AI-powered intelligence combined with a powerful and flexible user interface drastically reduces the time that deep experts need to spend on analysis, and at the same time allows newer staff to quickly learn on the job through the intuitive pre-populated drilldown paths and built-in context and explanations. This greatly amplifies the effectiveness of experienced performance analysts as well as making less experienced staff productive quickly.
From reactive to proactive with AI-powered automation
By IntelliMagic Vision’s automated application of embedded expert knowledge and AI infusion, performance analysts can move from reactive troubleshooting to collaborative proactive performance management across the entire IBM Z infrastructure. Experts from areas like Systems, CICS, Db2, Storage, MQ, Network, WebSphere, and more can work together using this unified interface across the mainframe platform.
With tens of thousands of pre-defined graphical reports and hundreds of intelligently assessed health insights and ratings, IntelliMagic Vision provides immediate insight into the health and performance of the z/OS environment right out of the box. Customers find budding issues they were unaware of right from the first high-level Health Exceptions dashboard. From that 30,000 foot view they can drill down to the deepest details to find the root cause of issues before they become a problem to the application users.
Intuitive and interactive drilldowns, customizable dashboards, and flexible report editing further allow analysts to quickly identify unseen risks, reduce the mean-time-to-resolution, tune workloads for significant cost savings.
Last, but not least, the intuitive user interface with the infusion of AI, multiply the impact of IBM Z experts, enable cross-silo collaboration, and, even more important, accelerate the training and effectiveness of new to IBM Z subject matter expert, who can find in the user interface itself insight about the metrics in the reports, in terms of explanation of the meaning, tuning information and more.
Screenshot from IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS showing all CP time used for a specific Service Class
The IntelliMagic and IBM advantage
With the addition of IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS to the IBM Z AIOps ecosystem, which includes solutions such as IBM OMEGAMON and IBM Z Performance and Capacity Analytics, mainframe environments can now benefit from the most robust and advanced set of technologies to protect and optimize their critical infrastructure.
The combination of IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS with IBM Z AIOps solutions enriches IBM’s AI-powered mainframe portfolio to deliver even more capabilities to help our clients move from reactive to proactive management of IT operations, and allows IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS to scale and innovate at a previously unattainable rate.
We are excited to offer this new solution to our mainframe customers and to continue working with them to address their needs.
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