Mainframe operators continue to face mounting challenges in monitoring their environments and resolving issues before they disrupt business-critical applications. One of the most persistent obstacles is managing the overwhelming volume and complexity of mainframe operations data. The speed at which data must be analyzed, correlated, and prioritized often surpasses human capacity—especially when relying on siloed, domain-specific tools. This fragmented approach results in limited visibility and context gaps, making it harder to correlate events and delaying root cause identification—ultimately increasing operational risk.

Introducing the upcoming IBM Concert for Z powered by watsonx

Concert for Z is an AI-powered IT operations management hub that simplifies mainframe operations to help maintain business resiliency while managing risk, compliance, and security. It helps teams identify issues, maintenance gaps and critical vulnerabilities early, enabling faster, and more confident actions.

Concert for Z’s capabilities focus on three main areas:

• Operations Management: Enables prioritization and grouping of IT events for faster analysis, accelerates root cause detection with AI-driven recommendations, and drives swift issue resolution to minimize business impact.
• Resiliency & Risk Management: Supports prediction and proactive management of operational risks, enabling corrective actions before disruptions occur.
• Security & Compliance:  Helps maintain strong security and continuous, evidence-based compliance across systems.

Your First Stop for Managing Mainframe Operations

Mainframe operations teams are entrusted with providing complete business continuity and being asked to do more with less, while the digital landscape produces more data, more events, and more noise. Typically, each component of IBM Z requires deep sub-domain expertise, and due to the interconnected nature of incidents, there hasn’t been an easy way to know precisely what is causing an issue or what to do to resolve it once one has been identified.

To address this significant challenge, we’ve designed IBM Z Concert for Z to help distill the complexity of mainframe operations down to a simplified platform and unified workflow. By channeling the Z platform’s operational data to a single, united interface, IBM Concert for Z is designed to act as the first stop for operations management across the entire Z platform. With built-in IBM Z AI expertise and the help of watsonx Assistant for Z, IBM Z Concert for Z empowers users to quickly prioritize events, alerts, risks & compliance to assess the business impact, and determine necessary actions.

No silos.  Quick decisions.

With Concert for Z, we are introducing an experience that is designed at its core to support mainframe and infrastructure teams who are looking to simplify mainframe operations while maximizing overall resiliency and reducing the time it takes to prioritize and address operational issues.

Within the confines of a single solution, it is engineered to help you aggregate, correlate, and contextualize the data to make timely operational and business decisions. Better yet, we’ve built in adaptive remediation recommendations based on best-practices and domain knowledge so you can access guidance at your fingertips and issue commands directly from the Concert for Z command console and can leverage existing automation with IBM Z System Automation or Ansible automation platform.

Quite simply, IBM Concert for Z provides end-to-end visibility across your IBM Z environment and is your new one-stop solution for locating, addressing, and learning about application issues, compliance and risks for your Z infrastructure performance.

To learn more, visit our website https://www.ibm.com/products/concert-for-z