By Lorin Ullmann, IBM Master Inventor, zAIOps Lead Architect, Service Management Unite
The need for Service Management Unite and Z ChatOps ?
Do you face challenges with siloed teams with inefficient collaboration that increases the time to resolve problems in your IT environment? Is your environment getting more and more complex and hybrid? Does your organization face skills issues as you go through a generational shift and at the same time you have the need to reduce the cost and maintain operational integrity under increasing transactional volume?
What is the Service Management Unite Z ChatOps Solution ?
The Service Management Unite (SMU) user interface connects into your existing environment and provides problem solving logic that helps the z/OS operations team identify, isolate, and resolve problems quickly. This interface allows operators to work at a higher level by leveraging data from performance monitoring, automation, network, and analytics management tools for various management domains. It includes consolidated views to work and resolve problems swiftly.
This diagram illustrates how System Management Unite management solution integrates with many tools you may have already installed in the IT environment. This approach provides a consolidated view of system health status and establishes a common look and feel framework for AIOps Operations management, sharing a common server, and integrated dashboard pages.
SMU provides web-based customizable dashboards to provide information to help Mainframe Operations team more quickly identify problems, isolate the issue to particular resource, and restore service or resolve problems. Productivity is improved with an integrated operations console and data from multiple Subject Matter Expert (SME) management tool domains: workloads being scheduled with IBM Z Scheduler, automation provided by IBM Z System Automation and IBM Z NetView, and performance monitoring with IBM® OMEGAMON®.
SMU provides a robust single point of control as interface for efficient automation tasks and for executing commands. Operators can both enter commands or use pre-filled commands to heal problems, submit prepared job procedures or use any MVS command without having to open and logon to a different screen. Multiple, long-running commands can be executed and tracked to completion with a single button click. You can more effectively execute complex tasks with just a right click such as starting and stopping heterogeneous business applications on IBM Z systems and distributed platforms.
IBM Z® ChatOps provides ChatOps capabilities for your IBM Z environment. The Z chatbot gives users access to the information from Z systems management tools with popular collaboration platforms like Slack and MicroSoft teams by leveraging and integrating with IBM Service Management Unite for a broad access to IBM Z operations data. This enables chat users to drill-down from the chatbot output to web-based SMU dashboards.
ChatOps is a model that integrates people, tools and processes into a collaboration platform so that teams can efficiently communicate and easily manage the flow of their work. IBM Z ChatOps provides support for Z environments by including a chatbot that gives users access to information from Z systems management tools directly into Slack®, Microsoft® Teams™, or Mattermost®. Easily notify the IT operations team about alerts from IBM Z applications. ChatOps also integrates with IBM Service Management Unite for broad access to IBM Z data to enable chat users to drill-down into web-based dashboards with additional information.
SMU Z ChatOps also runs in a z/OS Container!
IBM z/OS Container Extensions (zCX) is a new z/OS 2.4 feature that enables clients to deploy Linux applications as Docker containers on z/OS as part of a z/OS workload. You can also build your own images using the Docker infrastructure and command line provided by IBM zCX, just as you would on any other platform. Below is an illustration of how SMU can be deployed inside the z/OS native zCX container that provides, a preconfigured Linux kernel, Docker and uses network, storage and processor used by regular z/OS address spaces. The same SMU or Z ChatOps Docker image that can run the the zLinux or x86 Linux Docker runtime environment can also be deployed into this z/OS environment. A native z/OS deployment is easier and faster since there is no need for a separate Linux environment or as many skills associated with distributed platforms. The SMU Z ChatOps server can be run next to zAIOps management tools IBM Z Scheduler, automation provided by IBM Z System Automation and IBM Z NetView, and performance monitoring with IBM® OMEGAMON®.
Learn more about Service Management Unite from the SMU IBM product webpage and/or and try out SMU for free: SMU SMU with IBM Z System Automation and IBM Z NetView Trial or SMU with OMEGAMON Performance Monitoring Trial.