AIOps on IBM Z - Group home

Tell me if I’m wrong but haven’t we all received a gift at some point in our lives and quipped to ourselves, “it’s the thought that counts.” What we're really saying is I should acknowledge the effort but can I have something else. Like, anything else. We recognize someone put time into selecting the gift, paying for it, maybe even creating it, and now we’re stuck with it. Thank you, Aunt Ruth. Wouldn’t it have been better if Aunt Ruth had just asked us what we needed beforehand? 
 
It’s this type of problem that drives the AIOps design team to engage with users through the Sponsor User Program. We do want to know what you need.

Sponsor User Program: The Users’ Voice  

A pivotal part of any product development process should include direct outreach to real-world users who contribute their expertise, experience, and point-of-view helping surface users’ needs and pain points. By engaging with Sponsor Users we are able to gather the type of insights necessary to improve the value of and engagement with our offerings while reducing friction in the experience. The Sponsor User Program is a framework that includes people vetted for their specific domain knowledge and have agreed to regularly participate in research.  

Sponsor User Feedback Loop

Case Study: Resource Discovery on z/OS 

While running devoted 1-on-1 Sponsor User programs with customers is a new process within our portfolio, we have done this previously with interested customers for our Resource Discovery visualization component currently available in the IBM Wazi Analyze offering. In this tool, we were exploring a use case around self-service provisioning as part of a cross-portfolio effort to simplify Cloud Native Development in z/OS. We spent 8 sessions over 5 months working closely with a group of 10 different sponsor user organizations through joint z Design Council (zDC) Incubator calls focused on this use case. 
 
These sessions asked sponsor users to participate in refining the use case and collaborate with the product team in creating new ideas for the offering, to prioritize the most value propositions and features in the product, and provide feedback for the ongoing work the product team did between sessions.  
 
We then reached out to a subset of that Incubator group to participate in focused 1-on-1 sessions. We worked with them approximately once per quarter offering an, even more, hands-on and focused experience. We had them participate in a usability evaluation of the component where they showed us how they perceived the tool and its capabilities by trying to complete a set of common tasks using it. We also engaged them in some future design thinking exercises around the resources the tool should discover on their systems from the context of provisioning new Dev & Test environments as well as for evaluating the impact of coding changes on a Production environment, which was an additional use case that emerged. 
 
From these hands-on sessions, we made improvements to the provisioning flow that made it more seamless to complete. This use case sadly has yet to be picked up by any product. However, we also completed additional enhancements that enhanced the component more generally for multiple use cases.  
 
First, we needed to deal with regions of resources extending from subsystems that numbered in the 1000s. We called these connections mega-nodes when we realized the strategy for handling connections only worked for a small set of visible resources. Special mega-node groupings were designed to aid in working with resources in these situations. We conducted subsequent research on the design and ultimately built this design into the product to help provide navigation for these regions of infrastructure. 

Figure 2: Design that allows for grouping massive amounts of related connections as well as “pull-out” connections that are particularly of interest. 
 
Secondly, we made major enhancements to our search and navigation. We realized that a global expansion mechanism was an easy approach for us to build, but often users wouldn't know how many steps may exist between 2 resources of interest. Sponsor users demanded a richer and easier-to-use search experience. This led to a more "Google-ified" form of search that allows for specifications of node-to-node paths as well as other search refinement techniques. This has been subsequently researched in a more focused way and is in a process of review to be picked up by development. 

Figure 3: Allow for the operator of “to” to be added between the search terms to more easily define the pathway being searched 
 
Lastly, these design thinking sessions helped us expand the list of resources displayed so that we ensured what was needed was searchable, but what was not needed was obscured. This provided a more exhaustive, and yet focused view of the data. 

Figure 4: Inclusion of MQ resources into the discovery tool integration with z Anomaly Analytics. 
 
We've now rolled these enhancements not only to a code change impact use case that will be used by developers but also for a use case of helping to locate potential root causes within operations tools anomaly/system health dashboards. You can see the beginnings of this use case in Figure 4 above. 
Our sponsor users are trusted partners who get: 

• Sneak peeks at early product designs and new product directions 
• Regular opportunities to shape the product’s future, by providing feedback and domain expertise 
• Regular opportunities to refine the current product to better meet your needs 
• Chances to eliminate ideas that may perform poorly for your needs 
• Involvement in creating amazing user experiences 
• Better products that will save you time and help your company excel at business 

Sponsor User Activities Include

• IBM Design Thinking workshops 
• Interviews 
• Usability & concept testing 
• Job shadowing 
• Surveys 
• Migration planning & support 

Time commitments can vary and are at your team’s discretion, but we anticipate 1 hour per participant per month. 

Sponsor User Engagement

Become a zAIOps Sponsor User 

We are looking for… 

• Site Reliability Engineers 
• z/OS SMEs / SysProgs 
• Middleware SMEs / SysProgs 
• IT Operators 
• Architects 
• Data Scientists 

Contact Will Ryan
Learn more - IBM Sponsor User Program